Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Hope, Anne
HOPE, Mrs. ANNE (1809–1887), authoress, was born in 1809 at Calcutta, where her father, John Williamson Fulton, esq. (1769–1830), was at the time a prosperous merchant. Her mother was Anne, daughter of Robert Robertson, esq., and widow of Captain John Hunt of the Bengal army. Anne was the second of four daughters. At an early age she was sent from India to Lisburn, co. Antrim, where her father's family resided, and on her parents' return home, settled with them in Upper Harley Street, London. She was well educated, accomplished, and serious-minded; and appreciated the society of her father's friends, O'Connell, Lawless, and other Irish parliamentary leaders. In 1831 she married James Hope, M.D. [q. v.], and assisted him in some of his publications. After his death in 1841 she prepared a memoir of him, which Dr. Klein Grant edited (1844); it passed through four editions. Mrs. Hope zealously devoted herself to the education of her only son, Theodore (now Sir Theodore Cracraft Hope, K.C.S.I., C.I.E.), who joined the Bombay civil service in 1853. A series of letters on self-education which she addressed to him was published in 1842 and reissued in 1846. Her health compelled her to spend much time in Madeira between 1842 and 1850. There she studied church history, reading books in many languages, and she completed in 1850, but did not publish, a work on the church in the first three centuries. Her researches changed her religious views, and in November 1850 she became a Roman catholic. She made the acquaintance of W. G. Ward and John Dobree Dalgairns [q. v.], and lived for a time at Edgbaston, so as to be near the latter and Dr. (afterwards Cardinal) Newman at the Birmingham Oratory. Pursuing her studies in a spirit of devotion to her adopted church, she published in 1855 ‘The Acts of the Early Martyrs,’ a popular volume drawn from Fr. P. de Ribadeneira's ‘Flores Sanctorum,’ and intended for the use of the schools connected with the Birmingham Oratory. It passed through five editions. In 1859 appeared her life of St. Philip Neri, which soon reached a third edition. Mrs. Hope afterwards settled at Torquay, and, although permanently crippled by a spinal complaint, completed a life of St. Thomas à Becket in 1868, and a learned work on the ‘Conversion of the Teutonic Race,’ 1872 (2 vols.). To both works Dalgairns, Mrs. Hope's chief literary adviser, contributed a preface. Mrs. Hope wrote many articles in the ‘Dublin Review’ between 1872 and 1879, replying there to Mr. J. A. Froude's attack on St. Thomas à Becket in 1876. Her ‘Franciscan Martyrs in England’ appeared in 1878. Mrs. Hope died at St. Mary-church, Torquay, on 2 Feb. 1887. In 1894 Abbot Gasquet edited from Mrs. Hope's manuscript her ‘First Divorce of Henry VIII.’
[Private information; Gillow's Dict. of English Catholics, iii. 375; Burke's Landed Gentry, s.v. ‘Fulton.’]