Mary Russell Mitford (16 December 1787 – 10 January 1855) was an English author and dramatist. She was born at Alresford in Hampshire. She is best known for Our Village (1824), a series of sketches of village scenes and vividly drawn characters based upon her life in Three Mile Cross near Reading in Berkshire. Her description of village cricket in this book has been called by EW Swanton “the first major prose on the game” (bear in mind, Nyren‘s work was not published until 1833).
The cricket chapter is reproduced below