Frances Browne

Browne, Frances (1816–79), Irish writer. The seventh of 12 children of a Donegal village postmaster, she lost her sight in infancy, but nevertheless all her writing is marked by a strong sense of place. She wrote poems, novels, and a few children's stories, but is only known now for Granny's Wonderful Chair (1857), a collection of seven tales in the Grimm tradition within a frame story about a magical chair which can not only travel but also tell fairy tales. The book, which was not reprinted in her lifetime, was rediscovered by Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1887 and has remained a children's classic ever since.

Bibliography

• Filmer, Kath, “‘Happy Endings in Hard Times and Granny's Wonderful Chair’”, in The Victorian Fantasists: Essays on Culture, Society, and Belief in the Mythopoeic Fiction of the Victorian Age (1991).

— Gillian Avery

Browne, Frances (‘The Blind Poetess of Donegal’) (1816-1879). Born in Stranorlar, Co. Donegal, she lived in London from 1847. Her fiction and children's stories include Granny's Wonderful Chair and the Stories It Told (1856). In The Star of Atteghei (1844) and Pictures and Songs from Home (1856), the recurrent theme of her poetry is an exile's home-coming. My Share in the World (1862) is an autobiography.