Filton, Sarah Mary (name thus in British Museum Catalogue; Sarah Margaret Fitton in Allibone) I Miss Fitton l, writer of children's stories and lesson books. An Englishwoman, long resident in Paris; dated several of her booklets from her Paris address: 15, Rue de la Ville l'Evêque. Described by Elizabeth Barrett Browning in two letters written from Paris, Dec. 1851, as "an elderly woman, shrewd and kind" and rich; "there seems to be a good deal in her"; numbered among her acquaintances or friends John Kenyan, the Carmichael-Smyths, and Eugene Sue (Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Kenyan, II, 41; Letters of the Brownings to George Barrett, ed. Landis and Freeman, p. 158). Author of two books on botany: Conversations on Botany, 1817, a dialogue between Mother and her little son Edward; written, according to the Brit. Mus. Cat., with the assistance of Elizabeth Fitton; went through eight editions; and The Four Seasons, 1865, lectures written for the Working Men's Institute in Paris, dedicated by Miss Fitton to her "excellent old friend" Sir William Jackson Hooker. (Some paragraphs of Conversations appear practically verbatim in The Four Seasons.) Also wrote books on music: Conversations on Harmony, 1855, so well received that Miss Fitton brought out a French translation, 1857; and Little by Little, lessons in the art of reading music (no copy in Brit. Mus.). In addition, published in booklet form three stories for children: The Grateful Sparrow, Dicky Birds, and My Pretty Puss; and one story for adults, How I Became a Governess (reprinted from Good Words).
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