Mary Berry (16 March 1763 – 20 November 1852) was an English non-fiction writer born in Kirkbridge, North Yorkshire. She is best known for her letters and journals, namely Social Life in England and France from the French Revolution, published in 1831, and Journals and Correspondence, published after her death in 1865. Berry became notable through her association with close friend Horace Walpole, whose literary collection she, along with her sister and father, inherited. Berry was born in Kirkbridge, Yorkshire on 16 March 1763. Her younger sister Agnes, who proved to be Mary's closest confidant during her life, was born fourteen months later on 29 May 1764.[3] Their father, Robert Berry, was the nephew of a successful Scottish merchant named Ferguson. Robert received £300,000 in mid-life and bought an estate at Raith in Fifeshire. As the older son of Ferguson's sister, he began working at his uncle's counting-house in Broad Street, Austin Friars. In 1762, he married his distant cousin, a Miss Seaton. After giving birth to Mary and Agnes, she and their third child died three years later, in 1767, during childbirth. During her life Berry suffered from only one serious illness, a near-fatal attack of bilious fever in 1825. She died of old age around midnight on 20 November 1852 at age 90. Her sister, Agnes, had died in January of the same year.[5][6] Both are buried in the churchyard of St Peter's Church, Petersham.