Mariana Starke (1762–1838) was an influential English travel writer, though she also worked in other genres. She is best known for her travel guides to France and Italy, popular with British travellers to the Continent in the early nineteenth century. She wrote plays early in her career, before embarking on her first trip abroad in 1791. She worked as a translator over most of her working life, and latterly, also wrote poetry.

Life and writing career

Starke's mother was Mary (née Hughes) and her father was Richard Starke (1719–1793), an employee of the East India Company and former deputy-governor of Fort St George in Madras (now known as Chennai). For years scholars believed Starke had been born in India, but it is now accepted that she was born in Surrey, her parents' second child but the first to survive. She had two younger siblings: Louisa (1772-1792) and Richard (born 1768). Starke was raised at her family's estate, Hylands House, at Epsom. Starke's great-grandfather was Thomas Starke (c. 1649-1704), a Virginia landowner and "one of the first – and leading – London slave traders." Starke had many literary connections over the course of her career. Writer and biographer William Hayley was a family friend and he mentored Starke from a young age. At the beginning of her career, she collaborated with Millecent Parkhurst and George Monck Berkeley. Writer Catherine Maria Fanshawe was a family friend. She and her mother were also part of a circle of Epsom women interested in literature. Later, Starke became a friend of writer Mary Champion de Crespigny and dedicated two of her works to her. Starke began her career writing plays. Her first publication, in 1787, was an anonymous translation, co-authored with her friend Millecent Parkhurst, of Madame de Genlis’s Théâtre de l'éducation. Her 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 (1788). Her second professional production, the successful The Widow of Malabar (1790), "[e]mbellished with the rituals of Indian sati – a burning funeral pyre – and with specially composed music, ... was something of a spectacle." It was published by the Minerva Press. Starke accompanied her parents and sister to France and Italy for an extended period, between 1791 and 1798. The whole family, other than Starke herself, had tuberculosis, and she attended and nursed them. Her sister Louisa died months after setting out, in 1792, and Richard Starke died in 1794. This experience of expatriate life formed the basis for much of her later writing. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Starke returned to Italy and devoted the rest of her life to revisions of her travel guides, effectively reinventing the genre. Compiling a bibliography of her work is a complicated task as she frequently revised her guides and sometimes changed their titles.

Development of the travel guide

Earlier travel guides traditionally concentrated on architectural and scenic descriptions of the places usually visited by wealthy young men on the Grand Tour. 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. She, in response, included for the first time a wealth of advice on luggage, obtaining passports, the precise cost of food and accommodation in each city, and, perhaps not surprisingly given her own experience, advice on the care of invalid family members. She also devised a system of exclamation marks [!!!] used as ratings, a forerunner of today's star classifications. Starke's travel guides, initially published by John Murray, went into many editions and were often pirated. The ninth and final edition of Travels in Europe was published in 1839. Her books served as templates for later guides and earned her celebrity status in her lifetime. The French author Stendhal, in his 1839 novel The Charterhouse of Parma, refers to a travelling British historian who "never paid for the smallest trifle without first looking up its price in the Travels of a certain Mrs Starke, a book which...indicates to the prudent Englishman the cost of a turkey, an apple, a glass of milk and so forth."

Works

Plays

Poetry

Travel writing