Blanche Warre-Cornish

Blanche Warre-Cornish née Ritchie (widely known as Mrs Cornish, 5 July 1848 – 9 August 1922)[1] was an English conversationalist, celebrated for the "pregnant and startling irrelevancies" of her discourse.[2] She edited some reminiscences of her cousin, the novelist William Thackeray.

Family

Blanche was born in Calcutta, India. Her father was William Ritchie, Advocate-General of Bengal, and her brother Sir Richmond Ritchie, who spent most of his working life in the Indian Office. In 1866, aged 18, she married Francis Warre-Cornish, a master at Eton College and ultimately Vice-Provost of the school. Their several children included the writer Mary MacCarthy and Cecilia Fisher, who married William Wordsworth Fisher, later an admiral. Blanche Warre-Cornish died in Kensington, London.

Works

Warre-Cornish's published works included the novels Alcestis (1873) and Northam Cloisters (1882, sometimes misattributed to William Hamilton Maxwell).[3] She also wrote, for example, a memoir of Robert Hugh Benson[4] and edited some biographical reminiscences of her cousin, William Thackeray.

However, she was noted most of all for her conversation, with which she engaged and occasionally alarmed generations of Eton schoolboys. Some of her remarks were collected by Logan Pearsall Smith and printed privately in 1935 as Cornishiana. A second edition was printed in Cairo by the Press of the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale in 1947 and reprinted in 1999 by Stone Trough Books.

Warre-Cornish once gave the following advice to an assistant: "In all disagreeable circumstances remember the three things which I always say to myself: 'I am an Englishwoman;' 'I was born in wedlock;' 'I am on dry land.'"[5]

References
  1. Obituary and Death Notice in The Times (London), 10 August 1922, pp. 1 and 14, and 12 August, p. 14.
  2. According to Logan Pearsall Smith, recorded in Bensoniana & Cornishiana (Stone Trough Books, Settrington, 1999), p. 43.
  3. Jarndyce Booksellers' catalogue Women Writers 1795–1927 Part I: A–F (London, Summer 2017).
  4. Memorials of Robert Hugh Benson (Burns & Oates, 1915), co-written with Shane Leslie
  5. Bensoniana & Cornishiana (Stone Trough Books, Settrington, 1999), pp. 51–52.
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