Anna Maria Hussey

The smallest lettering on the sheet

Four inscriptions sit in the margins of Plate XIII of Illustrations of British Mycology. “Plate XIII.” is at the upper right. “Morchella esculenta, Dillen.” runs beneath the figures. “on stone by Reeve Brothers” is at the lower right. At the lower left, in the smallest type anywhere on the sheet, stands “A.M.H. del.” — delineavit, she drew it. The plate itself shows three morels on a low bank of moss, twigs and dark leaf litter: one cut lengthwise at the left to expose the hollow white chamber beneath the pitted cap, a tall dark specimen with pink-veined ridges in the centre, and a shorter ochre one at the right.

The title page carries a different name. It reads “MRS. T. J. HUSSEY.” Anna Maria Hussey, née Reed, born on 5 June 1805 at Leckhampstead in Buckinghamshire, published under her husband’s: the Rev. Dr Thomas John Hussey, rector of Hayes in Kent and an astronomer. No post, no degree and no learned-society membership is recorded for her. She worked privately, from the rectory, and it is the plates rather than the binding that carry her initials.

Two series, two sets of numbers

A warning is needed here, because the work has two series and each numbers its plates from the beginning. The morel plate belongs to the first: the Commons file page dates it to 1847 and files it with the set marked “ser. 1”. In the scanned copy of the second series the headings run from “Plate I.” to “Plate L.”, fifty figures in all — and Plate XIII of that volume is an entirely different fungus, the bay cup Peziza badia. Anyone who opens the scan and turns to the thirteenth plate finds a brown cup, not a morel.

The first series ran to ninety plates and was published by subscription; the second came out in monthly numbers of three plates, according to the Linda Hall Library. Ninety and fifty give the 140 plates of the bound two-volume edition.

The dates do not agree, and the honest course is to say so. The Internet Archive catalogues the work as “1847-55”. The Linda Hall Library describes two series appearing from 1849 to 1855, although the picture captions on that same page date volume one to 1847. The Oak Spring Garden Foundation cites 1855 alone. The title page of the second series carries the year 1855 and the imprint of Lovell Reeve, 5 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden — not the “Reeve, Benham and Reeve” of the catalogue record. What is certain is that the second series was finished after its author was dead: she died on 26 August 1853 in France, aged 48.

Whose initials are in the corner

Not all 140 plates are hers. Her younger sister Frances, known as Fanny, Reed drew some of them, and the drawings were put on stone by the Reeve Brothers. The book admits as much in its own text. At Plate XLV of the second series, describing Agaricus Reedii — gathered on Hayes Common, among moss and decaying beech-mast under very aged trees, at the end of May — it explains that Berkeley named the new species after the sister whose drawings, signed “F. R.”, grace the first series so liberally. The same passage remarks that the little agaric matches the beech-mast so closely that only a genuinely practised eye picks it out.

On that species the sources split. English Wikipedia follows the book and points to the sister. The Linda Hall Library, reproducing that very plate, says the opposite: that the name commemorates Hussey herself under her maiden name of Reed. This entry does not settle the disagreement; it records what the letterpress printed beside the plate says. The initials in the corner are a readable key, then, but only to the one figure they sit on.

The genus Berkeley gave her

Miles Joseph Berkeley, her correspondent and the man who supplied her determinations, named a genus of fungi after her in 1847; English Wikipedia quotes his dedication — “my friend, Mrs Hussey, whose talents well deserve such a distinction” — from his Decades of fungi in the London Journal of Botany. Index Fungorum holds the entry as record 19159: Husseia Berk., 1847, volume 6, page 508, name status “Legitimate” — and, under typification, “Type not indicated”. The type species, Husseia insignis Berk. 1847, is designated only in the later record 790386, and the holotype of that species, collected on soil by Gardner in March 1846 in what is now Sri Lanka, has a record of its own, 188881, and is held at Kew. The honour paid to a woman in a Kentish parsonage thus attached itself to a tropical fungus she never saw.

Husseia is not a name in use today. Index Fungorum gives its current name as Calostoma, record 19049, and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation note says the same. One trap is worth stepping around. The Linda Hall Library states that two mushroom genera were named in her honour, counting Husseya J. Agardh of 1901, renamed Husseyella in 1958. That is a red alga rather than a fungus; English Wikipedia attaches the name to a different person, the Australian collector Jessie Hussey, and notes that it is precisely this name that has been conserved against Berkeley’s genus. Only Husseia Berk. 1847 can properly be listed.

What a plate of morels cannot be asked to do

It is not a portrait. No authenticated likeness of Anna Maria Hussey has been found. The Wikimedia Commons category devoted to her holds 158 files and two subcategories — Illustrations of British mycology (1847) with 101 files and Illustrations of British mycology (1855) with 52 — and every one of those 158 titles, listed on 17 September 2026, describes an illustration of a fungus. The cover of this entry therefore shows her work, not her face.

Neither is it a determination in the modern sense. The name lettered on it, “Morchella esculenta, Dillen.”, is an 1840s application of a name whose circumscription has since been divided among several species. The plate is a historical figure, not a key. Hussey’s text mixes description with history, folklore, anecdote and cookery, and no part of it should be read as guidance about eating anything.

Her biography needs the same care. The phrase “Britain’s first female mycologist” circulates in booksellers’ descriptions and a recent popular reprint, but appears on none of the institutional pages consulted here. The number of her children is reported inconsistently: three at the Linda Hall Library, six at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and in English Wikipedia, whose footnote leads to a genealogy page. Accounts of her last months circulate that none of the institutions cited here corroborates, so this entry gives the date of her death and stops.

What can still be checked

There is one further trace of how attribution worked in practice. English Wikipedia reports that in 1847 a number of Hussey’s illustrations appeared as plates in Charles David Badham’s A treatise on the esculent funguses of England with no draughtswoman named, and footnotes an anonymous 1847 notice in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. That is one sentence in one source rather than a proved publishing history — but it is also the only recorded occasion on which her work was printed entirely without her.

The second series is scanned in full and free to read, the first series plates can be examined on Wikimedia Commons, and the specimens Hussey and her sister sent to Berkeley are now in the mycological herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The Internet Archive record still names the author as “Hussey, Thomas John, Mrs”, while Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and the Linda Hall Library all call her Anna Maria Hussey — one large catalogue keeps the old form, which is not the same as cataloguing keeping it. A reader who opens the scan can do the simplest and most telling thing available: work through the corners of the plates and see whose initials are standing there.