ABSTRACT
‘Mrs Major Jourdan’ was the signature used by Mary Johnson Jourdan when her poems were first published, an indication of her connection through her husband with the British forces in India. Her life before marriage had also been shaped by the army: Mary Holcombe’s father was an officer in the Royal Artillery, Colonel Harcourt Ford Holcombe. Jourdan’s literary career began in the 1830s. In 1831, she was living in Aberdeen when she wrote to Walter Scott, soliciting his opinion on her poem ‘The Ocean’s Own’. Jourdan’s early work was reviewed in several periodicals, and generally well received: Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine commended the ‘smooth and elegant versification’ of The Althorp Picture Gallery, with its echoes of Byron and Shelley. The texts included are drawn from Jourdan’s last publication, the collection Mind’s Mirror; some are extensively revised versions of works that first appeared in the Bengal Annual in the 1830s.
