Small image of a man handing a book to a women across a counter.

At the Circulating Library

A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901

A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901

Author: Hannah Murray

Author: Hannah Murray (1836–1873)

Alternate Name(s): Green (maiden name); Mrs. William Murray (familiar name)

Biography: Hannah Murray was born in Wakefield in 1836, the third daughter of George Green. In 1855, she married Scottish accountant William Murray. The couple travelled to America, spending time in Mexico and San Francisco (where their daughter Anita Linda was born in 1856). On the voyage back to England, the ship David Brown carrying Murray and her daughter floundered in the Atlantic. She wrote about her shipwreck experience in a story "Ten Terrible Days" for All the Year Round (26 March 1864). Murray followed this with a novel Lilian's Inheritance (1867) and several more periodical works. In 1871, she was living with her husband and daughter in West Derby, Lancashire. They must have returned to America since she died on 12 August 1873 in San Francisco. Her daughter Anita L. Murray remained in California where she was a painter. She died there in 1940.

References: British Census (1861, 1871); Probate; Wakefield Herald (5 January 1855); Whitby Authors (1867).

Fiction Titles:

  1. Lilian's Inheritance.  2 vol.  London: T. C. Newby, 1867.