1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sherwood, Mary Martha

SHERWOOD, MARY MARTHA (1775–1851), English author, was born at Stanford, Worcestershire, on the 6th of May 1775, the daughter of the Rev. George Butt, D.D., then rector of Stanford. In 1803 she married her cousin, Captain Henry Sherwood, an officer in the British army, and subsequently accompanied him to India, where she devoted herself to charitable work and to writing. Her Indian story, Little Henry and his Bearer, was translated into many languages. Her best-known work, however, is The History of the Fairchild Family, written after her return to England, of which the first part appeared in 1818, and the second and third parts in 1842 and 1847 respectively. The sub-title of this tale is The Child's Manual, being a series of stories calculated to show the importance and ejects of a religious education. The book had a very large sale among the English middle-classes. Mrs Sherwood wrote nearly a hundred stories of a religious type and tracts, mainly for the young. She died on the 22nd of September 1851.

See The Life and Times of Mrs Sherwood. From the Diaries of Captain and Mrs Sherwood, edited by F. J. H. Darton (1910).