Mary Julia Young () was a prolific novelist, poet, translator, and biographer, active in the Romantic period, who published the bulk of her works with market-driven publishers James Fletcher Hughes and William Lane of the Minerva Press. She is of particular interest as an example of a professional woman writer in "a market of mass novel production."
Life
Very little is known of Young's life or circumstances, despite her considerable literary output. It has been surmised from her publication history that she may have been in a precarious financial position. Some of her novels have been described as "potboilers," though she also wrote "an excellent theatrical biography" and other "intelligent and interesting work." She applied to the Royal Literary Fund for financial assistance in 1808. What little is known about her derives from this application: she was the last living representative of her family, and had a familial connection to well-known Augustan poet Edward Young (1683–1765).
Writing
Young initially wrote poetry but soon expanded into other genres. Her first collection of verse, Genius and Fancy, described as "a survey of the London stage," was published in 1791, went into a second edition in 1795, and then was immediately republished in an expanded edition with three times the number of pages as the original. That third edition is also significant in that it was published under Young's own name, rather than as "by a lady" as the first two editions were.
Young published three translations. She translated Lindorf and Caroline (1803), an historical novel attributed to the highly prolific yet stringently anonymous German author, Benedikte Naubert. One of her other two translations was also of a work by a woman author: J. B. C. Berthier's The Mother and Daughter (1804). The third translation, of writings of François-Marie Arouet's (Voltaire), was published as Voltairiana.
Young published either eight or nine novels; The family party (London: Minerva Press, 1791) has generally been attributed to her but at least one critic has argued that this is probably a miss-attribution. Young's novels were written to sell: they were frequently sentimental, often Gothic, and sometimes sensational. Reviews were mixed. Practically all of her work was published under her own name, given the prestige of her connection to Edward Young, though she published A Summer at Brighton anonymously in 1807. It was evidently successful as it went into a second and third edition that same year, and fourth and fifth editions (the latter with an additional volume of material) in 1808. Her next novel, A Summer at Weymouth, was also published anonymously, likely because both were scandal novels. Her next and final novel, The Heir of Drumcondra, marked a return to the sentimental novel and was again published under her own name. It was not published by her longtime publisher James Fletcher Hughes, however, because he went bankrupt in 1808, but by Minerva press. It was at this point, at the end of a busy writing career, that Young was obliged to apply to the Royal Literary Fund.
Young had a longstanding interest in the theatre and in addition to her poetry, fiction, and translations, in 1806 she published a well-regarded biography of actress Anna Maria Crouch (1763—1805): Memoirs of Mrs. Crouch. Including a Retrospect of the Stage, during the Years she Performed.
While she was listed by Dale Spender in Mothers of the Novel in 1986 as one of the "lost" women writers of the period before Jane Austen, she has since received some critical attention. Her poetry was anthologized in 1997 and 2002, and there is a growing body of scholarly research.