Mary Louisa Armitt

Mary Louisa Armitt (31 July 1851 – 24 September 1911) was an English polymath. She was a teacher, writer, ornithologist and philanthropist. She was the funder and founder of the Armitt Library, Ambleside.

Life Armitt was born in Salford, Lancashire in 1851. She was one of three gifted daughters who were born to William and Mary Ann Armitt (née Whalley). All three girls wrote, and they all attended Islington House Academy, but each specialised in a different subject. This academy was in Salford and it trained people to teach along Pestalozzian principles. Sophia, who was born in 1847, took botany and art while her younger sister Annie Maria, who was born in 1850, studied English literature. Mary—who was known as Louie—was the youngest and excelled at music and natural history. She was educated at the Mechanics' Institute in Manchester as soon as she was of age.

One of Armitt's notable areas of study was music. She wrote a number of articles on the history of music and also was a music critic for the Manchester City News.

In 1886, Armitt and Sophie retired to Hawkshead, near where Annie was already living, and continued their cultural interests, talking to artists, writers and educationalists like Charlotte Mason and Frances Arnold. Mason, who ran a school for governesses, was publishing the Parents Review, and Mary contributed articles for it. By 1894 Annie was a widow and had moved in with her sisters

Death and legacy Armitt died in Rydal in 1911 and was buried in Ambleside. By then, her library included two earlier collections dating from 1828 and 1882. The latter was John Ruskin's Ambleside library, and the former was an early collection from the Ambleside Book Club, to which William Wordsworth had been a subscriber. The Armitt Library was officially opened in 1912.

In 1912, Armitt's history of Grasmere Church was published posthumously.