Mariana Starke was an influential English travel writer, though she worked in other genres.
14 Facts About Mariana Starke
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Mariana Starke is best known for her travel guides to France and Italy, popular with British travellers to the Continent in the early nineteenth century.
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Mariana Starke wrote plays early in her career, before embarking on her first trip abroad in 1791.
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Mariana Starke worked as a translator over most of her working life, and latterly, wrote poetry.
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For years scholars believed Mariana Starke had been born in India, but it is accepted that she was born in Surrey, her parents' second child but the first to survive.
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Mariana Starke was raised at her family's estate, Hylands House, at Epsom.
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Mariana Starke had many literary connections over the course of her career.
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Later, Mariana Starke became a friend of writer Mary Champion de Crespigny and dedicated two of her works to her.
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Mariana Starke's first publication, in 1787, was an anonymous translation, co-authored with her friend Millecent Parkhurst, of Madame de Genlis's Theatre de l'education.
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Mariana Starke's family had vested interests in India since her grandfather's time, and she used that country as a background for the first of her plays to be professionally produced, The Sword of Peace.
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Mariana Starke accompanied her parents and sister to France and Italy for an extended period, between 1791 and 1798.
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The whole family, other than Mariana Starke herself, had tuberculosis, and she attended and nursed them.
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Mariana Starke recognised that with the enormous growth in the number of Britons travelling abroad after 1815, the majority of her potential readers were now travelling in family groups and often on a budget.
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Mariana Starke's books served as templates for later guides and earned her celebrity status in her lifetime.