AustLit

Biography of Mary Mitford.

'Few people, even book lovers, know, anything of Mary Mitford except that she wrote "Our Village," and this they have not read. They, do not know that Miss Mitford, though she herself was genteel in a strictly Victorian way, had an eccentric father whose gambling extravagances and love of the "dogs" were neither genteel nor Victorian, according to our current view of that age. The present play chiefly tells of the firm and unfaltering devotion of Mary to her father, in spite of his having "busted" £20,000 won by her in a lottery and several times brought his family to ruin, so that Mary had to keep the house going by working incessantly at her books, only breaking off to read her father the sporting newspapers. A curious and  incongruous pair, these Mitfords, hiding away in musty records of a century ago.'

Source:

'Three Mile Cross', Daily Examiner, 10 January 1940, p.6.