Clarke Mary Cowden

Clarke, Mary Cowden, the daughter of Vincent Novello, the composer, was born in London in 1809. At the age of 19 she married Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke, a publisher and a man of culture, who had enjoyed the friendship of Keats, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, and had devoted much attention to Elizabethan literature. In conjunction with her husband, who died in 1877, Mrs. Cowden Clarke edited and annotated Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare, and, amongst other volumes of lighter interest, wrote The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines. But the great task of her life has been her Complete Concordance to Shakespeare. a laborious undertaking, the first edition of which appeared in 1845.