MRS. DAY'S DAUGHTERS "The common growth of Mother Earth Suffices me—her tears, her mirth, Her humblest mirth and tears." Mary E. Mann, née Rackham, (14 August 1848 – 19 May 1929)[1] was an English writer of novels and short stories, primarily on themes of poverty and rural English life. Shropham was renamed 'Dulditch' in her novels, reflecting her view of the village as isolated and bleak. Formerly regarded as a novelist belonging to the ‘earthy’ rural genre, her short stories in Tales of Victorian Norfolk are grim but authentic accounts of poverty and deprivation. Often described by some as Norfolk's Thomas Hardy, Mann was admired by D. H. Lawrence. Novels include Mrs Day's Daughters, and The Patten Experiment (1899) where a group of well-meaning middle class folk try to live on a labourer's wage for a week. Her work has recently been rediscovered as a major contributor to East Anglian literature, championed among others by A. S. Byatt, who in 1998 included her story Little Brother in The Oxford Book of English Short Stories. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography considers her best work to be not her novels but short fiction written in the 1890s such as Ben Pitcher's Elly, Dora o' the Ringolets and The Lost Housen, arguing them to be the equal of Hardy's but based on a matter-of-fact mood rather than Hardy's "vengeful determinism" Some of her novels continue to be republished. In 2005 theatre company Eastern Angles used a collection of her characters and stories to create a new play A Dulditch Angel. It was directed by Orla O'Loughlin and written by Steven Canny.