Mary Peisley was less of an author, either in spirit or practice, than her friend and associate Catherine Phillips, yet writing was an important part of her brief but highly successful career in the mid eighteenth century as a Quaker minister and preacher. During this career she delivered probably hundreds of impromptu sermons, which have not survived. Her religious letters have fared better, since they were collected by her widower, Samuel Neale, and published in edited form after he died, which was more than a generation after she did.