Anna Mary Howitt
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Anna Mary Howitt (married name Anna Mary Watts, 15 January 1824 - 23 July 1884) was an English painter, writer and feminist.
Writer and spiritualist
In 1859, Howitt married a childhood friend, the revenue officer Alaric Alfred Watts (b. 1823-4) and moved with him to Chelsea. They shared literary ambitions that resulted in Aurora: a Volume of Verse (1884). This reflected a new-found interest in spiritualism, to which her parents had turned in the early 1850s, as did her book Pioneers of the Spiritual Reformation (1883), which consisted of biographical sketches of the German poet Justinus Kerner and of her father William Howitt, but whose other purpose was to promote spiritualism, mesmerism and similar phenomena. Some contemporaries suggested that she suffered from periodic mental illness in later life.
Anna Mary Watts died of diphtheria in 1884 at Mair am Hof in Dietenheim (Bruneck), since 1919 part of Italy, during a visit to her mother in Tyrol.