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For more than twenty years Mary Meeke was one of the most popular and prolific writers of Gothic fiction for Minerva Press. Following the model of Ann Radcliffe, she wrote more than thirty novels with well-plotted, moral stories, in most of which a young person's hidden noble birth is gradually revealed. She also wrote nearly a dozen books under the pseudonym Gabrielli. Her books were favorites of such writers as Thomas Macaulay and Mary Mitford. Today they are seldom read: only one is available in a modern facsimile reprint.
Little is known about Mary Meeke's life. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Mary "seems to have been the wife of Reverend Francis Meeke," who received his B.A. (1773) and M.A. (1776) from Christ's College, Cambridge, and "published a volume of poems in 1782." In October 1816 a Mary Meeke, widow of Reverend Francis Meeke, died at Johnson Hall, Staffordshire. This woman may have been Mary Meeke the novelist.
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