English writer, daughter of Edmund Cartwright, the inventor of the power-loom. She was born at her fathers rectory at Goadby Marwood, Leicestershire, on the 3rd of August 1780. In 1804 she married the Rev. John Penrose, a country clergyman in Lincolnshire and a voluminous theological writer. During her girlhood Mrs. Penrose had frequently stayed with relatives at Markham, a village in Nottinghamshire, and from this place she took the nom de plume of Mrs. Markham, under which she gained celebrity as a writer of history and other books for the young. The best known of her books was A History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans to the End of the Reign of George III. (1823), which went through numerous editions. In 1828 she published a History of France. Both these works enjoyed a wide popularity in America as well as in England. The distinctive characteristic of Mrs. Markhams histories was the elimination of all the horrors of history, and of the complications of modern party politics, as being unsuitable for the youthful mind; and the addition to each chapter of Conversations between a fictitious group consisting of teacher and pupils bearing upon the subject matter. Her less well-known works were Amusements of Westernheath, or Moral Stories for Children (2 vols., 1824); A Visit to the Zoological Gardens (1829); two volumes of stories entitled The New Childrens Friend (1832); Historical Conversations for Young People (1836); Sermons for Children (1837). Mrs. Markham died at Lincoln on the 24th of January 1837.
See Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and his Friends (2 vols., London, 1891); G. C. Boase and W. P. Courtney, Bibliotheca Cornubiensis (3 vols., London, 18741882).