Mary Scott (born 19 July 1751/2, South Petherton, Somerset died 10 June 1793, Somerset), who became Mary Taylor after her marriage, was an English poet originating from Milborne Port, Somerset. Notable for her literary contributions, Scott authored " The Female Advocate " in 1774, a work advocating for women's participation in writing and literature.
Scott's father was a linen draper. [1] Not much else is known about her life before the publication of The Female Advocate , dedicated to her friend Mary Steele, in 1774. [2] Scott credits John Duncombe's The Feminead (1754), a poem in praise of the accomplishments of women writers, as the inspiration for her own poem.
The poem consists of 522 lines of rhyming couplets; it supplements Duncombe's, and discusses more contemporary writers. Among the poets referred to are Lucy Aikin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Fielding, Anne Killigrew, Catharine Macaulay, Catherine Parr, Helen Maria Williams, and Phillis Wheatley.
Men are also praised: Duncombe; Rev. Thomas Seward, author of The Female Right to Literature, in a Letter to a Young Lady from Florence (1766); William Steele, for his support of his daughter's writing; and Richard Pulteney (1730–1801), a friend and physician who encouraged Scott.
She began a correspondence with Anna Seward, whose father she had praised in The Female Advocate, and Seward's published letters are the source of much that is known of Scott's life. [2] In the preface the Advocate, Scott mentions ongoing ill-health and indeed seems to have been a semi-invalid. She lived with her parents until she was in her thirties, caring for her ailing mother until she died in 1787. Her father died in 1788, and Scott was free after over a decade of courtship to marry John Taylor, a match her mother had opposed when alive.
Scott was part of a circle of Protestant dissenters and was deeply religious; [3] consequently, when her husband, who had formerly convinced her to convert to Unitarianism, embraced Quakerism, she underwent considerable strain. Scott gave birth to a daughter in 1789 and a son in 1791 (her son, John Edward Taylor, went on to found the Manchester Guardian ). [4] She died late in her third pregnancy, in 1793, at the age of forty-one. [5]
Anna Seward was an English Romantic poet, often called the Swan of Lichfield. She benefited from her father's progressive views on female education.
Jane West (1758–1852), was an English novelist who published as Prudentia Homespun and Mrs. West. She also wrote conduct literature, poetry and educational tracts.
Mary Leapor (1722–1746) was an English poet, born in Marston St. Lawrence, Northamptonshire, the only child of Anne Sharman and Philip Leapor (1693–1771), a gardener. She, out of the many labouring-class writers of the period, was noticeably well received.
Sarah Fyge Egerton (1668–1723) was an English poet who wrote in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In her works The Female Advocate and Poems on Several Occasions, Egerton wrote about gender, friendship, marriage, religion, education, politics, and other topics. She is chiefly known as the spirited teen who responded in defense of women to Robert Gould's misogynist satire.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
John Duncombe was an English clergyman and writer.
The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.
The Unsex'd Females, a Poem (1798), by Richard Polwhele, is a polemical intervention into the public debates over the role of women at the end of the 18th century. The poem is primarily concerned with what Polwhele characterizes as the encroachment of radical French political and philosophical ideas into British society, particularly those associated with the Enlightenment. These subjects come together, for Polwhele, in the revolutionary figure of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Susanna Duncombe was an English poet and artist.
Mary Darwall, who sometimes wrote as Harriett Airey, was an English poet and playwright. She belonged to the Shenstone Circle of writers gathered round William Shenstone in the English Midlands. She later explored subjects that included the nature of female friendship and the place of women writers.
Mehetabel Wesley Wright was an English poet. She was a member of the influential religious Wesley family.
Mary Scott's The Female Advocate; a poem occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombe's Feminead (1775) is both a celebration of women's literary achievements, as well as an impassioned piece of advocacy for women's right to literary self-expression.
John Duncombe (1729-1786) published his "canon-forming" celebration of British women writers as The Feminiad in 1754, though the title was revised as The Feminead in the second, 1757 edition.
During the eighteenth century, there were several attempts to describe a "women's literary tradition." This table compares six eighteenth-century collections of notable women: George Ballard's Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain (1752), John Duncombe's The Feminead (1754), the Biographium Faemineum, Mary Scott's The Female Advocate (1775), Richard Polwhele's The Unsex'd Females (1798), and Mary Hay's Female Biography (1803).
Elizabeth Dauncey, one of Thomas More's children, was part of a circle of exceptionally educated and accomplished women who exemplified "learned ladies" for the next two centuries.
Cecily Heron, one of Thomas More's children, was part of a circle of exceptionally educated and accomplished women who exemplified "learned ladies" for the next two centuries.
Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755) is one of the first anthologies of women's writing in English. It was edited by George Colman (1732–1794) and Bonnell Thornton (1725–1768).
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