Mary Clark Mohl

Mary Clarke Mohl (born Elizabeth Mary Clarke) was a lively correspondent of Elizabeth Jesser Reid, who was one of the few British women that Mohl deemed consequential and intelligent enough to merit attention.

Born to an upper class family, Mohl and her mother went to live in France after the death of her father when Mohl was eight. They only had a small income, but distinguished themselves as gifted hostesses, whose home attracted Paris’s leading intellectuals. Mohl retained close ties with Britain, often visiting her sister at Cold Overton in Leicestershire. However, she preferred the social freedoms, and the higher intellectual and conversational standards she found in France, where her guests included writers Ivan Turgenev, George Eliot, and Mrs Gaskell, who wrote part of Wives and Daughters at her home on the Rue du Bac in Paris. She maintained a close friendship with Florence Nightingale, offering moral and practical support for her work in the Crimea.

She married the German orientalist Julius Mohl in 1847; theirs was a devoted marriage, and they are buried together in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Mohl was not directly involved with Bedford College, although she did recommend tutors and tried to help find situations for girls that Reid was assisting. While prizing her own intellectual independence, she was not what we would now call a feminist. With some notable exceptions, she was dismissive of women - especially British women - as dull, preferring men as conversationalists. 

While her final years were plagued by ill health, her wit remained and writers like Henry James continued to visit her in Paris. However, after the death of her husband in 1876 she withdrew from society and devoted herself to editing and publishing his papers until her own death in 1883.