Maria Polack

Maria Polack
Born(1787-01-31)31 January 1787
Died8 January 1849(1849-01-08) (aged 61)
Whitechapel
OccupationsTeacher of music and poetry
Writing career
LanguageEnglish
GenreFiction
Notable workFiction without Romance (1830)

Maria Polack (31 January 1787 – 8 January 1849) was an English Jewish novelist and educator. Her father, Ephraim Polack, was a prominent member of the Great Synagogue of London, and her niece (or perhaps daughter), Elizabeth Polack, was the first Jewish woman melodramatist in England.

In 1830 Polack published by subscription the two-volume anti-romance Fiction without Romance, or The Locket Watch, which focuses on the importance of female education and respecting religious and class differences. The novel depicts a gentile family in Devonshire, a member of whom, Eliza Desbro, encounters a sympathetic Jewish family after discovering her status as a bastard. The one-hundred and twenty subscribers to Polack's book included John Braham (two copies), Mrs Nathan Rothschild (five copies), and members of the Goldsmid family (six copies). A second, non-subscriber edition was published two years after the first edition.

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ "Died". The Jewish Chronicle. 12 January 1849. p. 116.
  2. ↑ "A Hundred and One Years Old". The Jewish Chronicle. 1 March 1901. p. 19.
  3. ↑ Picciotto, James (1875). Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History. London: Trübner & Co. p. 232. OCLC 186884797.
  4. ↑ Weltman, Sharon (2018). Hartley, Lucy (ed.). "Women Playwrights and the London Stage," in The History of British Women's Writing, 1830–1880. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 204. ISBN 978-1-137-58465-6.
  5. ↑ Galchinsky, Michael (1996). The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England. Wayne State University Press. p. 100. ISBN 978-0-8143-2613-8.
  6. ↑ Kaufman, Heidi (2016). "1800-1900: Inside and Outside the Nineteenth-Century East End". BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Retrieved 14 May 2019.
  7. ↑ "Books published this day". The Globe. 14 May 1830. p. 1.
  8. ↑ Scrivener, Michael (2011). Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 133. doi:10.1057/9780230120020. ISBN 978-1-349-28741-3. OCLC 951509609.
  9. ↑ Kaufman, Heidi (2011). "England's Jewish Renaissance: Maria Polack's Fiction Without Romance (1830) in Context". In Spector, Sheila A. (ed.). Romanticism/Judaica: A Convergence of Cultures. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Company. pp. 69–84. ISBN 978-0-7546-6880-0.
  10. ↑ Conway, David (2007). "John Braham—From Meshorrer to Tenor". Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England. 41. London: Jewish Historical Society of England: 37–61. JSTOR 29780093.
  11. ↑ "Just Published". Athenaeum and Literary Chronicle. 21 April 1832. p. 261.
  12. ↑ "Advertisements". Athenaeum and Literary Chronicle. 21 April 1832. p. 262.