Mary Scott poet, was born in Somerset

Somerset

The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

.

Scott's father was a linen draper

Draper

Draper is the now largely obsolete term for a wholesaler, or especially retailer, of cloth, mainly for clothing, or one who works in a draper's shop. A draper may additionally operate as a cloth merchant or a haberdasher. The drapers were an important trade guild...

. Not much else is known about her life before the publication of The Female Advocate, dedicated to her friend Anne Steele

Anne Steele

Anne Steele , English hymn writer, was born at Broughton, Hampshire.The drowning of her betrothed, a Mr. Elscourt, a few hours before the time fixed for her marriage deeply affected an otherwise quiet life, and her hymns rather emphasize the less optimistic phases of Christian experience...

, in 1774. 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

Lucy Aikin

Lucy Aikin , born at Warrington, England into a distinguished literary family of prominent Unitarians, was a historical writer.-Family and education:...

, Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Anna Laetitia Barbauld was a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and children's author.A "woman of letters" who published in multiple genres, Barbauld had a successful writing career at a time when female professional writers were rare...

, Mary Chudleigh

Lady Mary Chudleigh

Mary Chudleigh was part of an intellectual circle that included Mary Astell, Elizabeth Thomas, Judith Drake, Elizabeth Elstob, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and John Norris...

, Sarah Fielding

Sarah Fielding

Sarah Fielding was a British author and sister of the novelist Henry Fielding. She was the author of The Governess, or The Little Female Academy , which was the first novel in English written especially for children , and had earlier achieved success with her novel The Adventures of David Simple...

, Anne Killigrew

Anne Killigrew

Anne Killigrew was an English poet. Born in London, Killigrew is perhaps best known as the subject of a famous elegy by the poet John Dryden entitled To The Pious Memory of the Accomplish'd Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew . She was however a skilful poet in her own right, and her Poems were...

, Catherine Macaulay

Catherine Macaulay

Catharine Macaulay was an English historian.-Early life: 1731 – 1763:...

, Catherine Parr

Catherine Parr

Catherine Parr ; 1512 – 5 September 1548) was Queen consort of England and Ireland and the last of the six wives of King Henry VIII of England. She married Henry VIII on 12 July 1543. She was the fourth commoner Henry had taken as his consort, and outlived him...

, Helen Maria Williams

Helen Maria Williams

Helen Maria Williams was a British novelist, poet, and translator of French-language works. A religious dissenter, she was a supporter of abolitionism and of the ideals of the French Revolution; she was imprisoned in Paris during the Reign of Terror, but nonetheless spent much of the rest of her...

, and Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was the first African American poet and first African-American woman whose writings were published. Born in Gambia, Senegal, she was sold into slavery at age seven...

.

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

Richard Pulteney

Richard Pulteney was an English physician and botanist. He was a promoter of Linnaean taxonomy, and authored the first English language biography of Carl Linnaeus, entitled A General View of the Writings of Linnaeus. He was educated at Loughborough Grammar School, and a school house was named...

 (1730–1801), a friend and physician who encouraged Scott.

She began a correspondence with Anna Seward

Anna Seward

Anna Seward was an English Romantic poet, often called the Swan of Lichfield.-Life:Seward was the elder daughter of Thomas Seward , prebendary of Lichfield and Salisbury, and author...

, 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. 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; 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

John Edward Taylor

John Edward Taylor was the founder of the Manchester Guardian newspaper, later to become The Guardian.-Biography:...

, went on to found the Manchester Guardian). She died late in her third pregnancy, in 1793, at the age of forty-one.

Works

• The Female Advocate: A Poem, Occasioned by Reading Mr. Duncombe's Feminead (London: Joseph Johnson, 1774)
• "Verses Addressed to Miss Seward, on the Publication of her Monody on Major André," the Gentleman's Magazine (June 1783)
• The Messiah. A Poem, in Two Parts. Published for the benefit of the General Hospital at Bath ([Bath]: R. Cruttwell, 1788.)

Resources

• Blain, Virginia, et al., eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1990.
• Buck, Claire, ed. The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. Prentice Hall, 1992.
• Lonsdale, Roger ed. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
• Mullan, John. “Scott , Mary (1751/2–1793).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 16 Apr. 2007.
• Todd, Janet, ed. British Women Writers: a critical reference guide. London: Routledge, 1989.