Cristall, Anne Batten

(b. 1769)

   Cristall was born in Penzance but the family moved to London when she was young. Her brother was Joshua Cristall, the celebrated water-colorist whose portrait is in the National Art Gallery. She became a schoolteacher and by the late 1780s she had become a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft. The poet George Dyer (see entry) took a personal interest in her and in 1797 introduced her to Robert Southey (see entry). There is no record of her death. Her Poetical Sketches, twenty-four poems of accomplished if melancholic pieces, some of them with several parts, were published in 1795. Some of her poems: "Before Twilight. Eyezion," "Elegy on a Young Lady," "Ode on Truth: Addressed to George Dyer," "The Blind Man," "The Snow-Fiend," "The Triumph of Superstition, Raphael and Ianthe," "Verses Written in the Spring," "Written in Devonshire, Near the Dart," "Written When the Mind Was Oppressed."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition, 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Poetical Sketches of Anne Batten: All Her Poems (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/CriSket.html). Romantic Women Poets: An Antholog y. Duncan Wu, ed. Blackwell Publishers, 1997.