Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Barber
-
Standard Name: Barber, Mary
Birth Name: Mary
Married Name: Mary Barber
Pseudonym: Sapphira
Pseudonym: M. B.
MB
is a domestic, small-scale, early eighteenth-century poet of charm and intelligence (remembered particularly for her writing about her children), but also an incisive, often satirical commentator on social and gender issues. Her single collection of poems was preceded by a number of separately-published pieces, mostly anonymous, not all specifically mentioned here.
Constantia Crawley (later CG
) became (through her own efforts, said Mary Barber
) proficient in Latin, Greek, history, theology, philosophy and mathematics. Laetitia Pilkington
says she also knew Hebrew (which Mary Delany
doubted), and...
Friends, Associates
Mary Caesar
MC
shared her husband's network of high-level connections in circles of Jacobites
and Jacobite sympathisers. She was a friend of the writers Pope
, Prior
, Swift
, and Mary Barber
, and of the...
MC
seems to have become the real friend of several women of higher rank than herself, some of whom moved from the position of her customers to that of her patrons: they included Lady Hertford
Friends, Associates
Constantia Grierson
CG
was a friend from their adolescence of the young women who became the poets Mary Barber
and Laetitia Pilkington
. Their shared friendship with Jonathan Swift
has been an element in preserving some memory...
Intertextuality and Influence
Laetitia Pilkington
LP
was vividly aware of the literary handicap represented by her gender. But she was choosy about claiming influence. She decried Manley
, Haywood
, and Mary Barber
(whose poems, she says, would have been...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Collier
The commonplace-book throws light on Collier's other extant writings as well. A casual mention of what Sally calls the Turba proves definitively that at least one neologism in The Cry stemmed not from her but...
Literary responses
Constantia Grierson
Mary Barber
responded to the feeling expressed in this poem with a somewhat clumsy poetic attempt at comfort.
Barber, Mary, Jonathan Swift, and Constantia Grierson. Poems on Several Occasions. C. Rivington, 1734.
38-40
politics
Mary Caesar
She acted on her Jacobite principles in attending parliamentary debates, reading the memoirs of statesmen, and visiting Tory detainees in prison. Indeed, though she never questioned that men were intended to manage public affairs, she...
Publishing
Constantia Grierson
The Gentleman's Magazine reprinted (two or three years after CG
's death) her To Mrs. Mary Barber, which had just appeared in Barber's Poems on Several Occasions.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
5 (August 1735): 492
Textual Features
Martha Hale
The poems, though not mostly ambitious in mode, display remarkable skill and versatility for an amateur. MH
addresses domestic themes (in love-poetry and family verse) with wit, ingenuity, and an unusual focus on the female...
Textual Features
Mary Jones
MJ
's tone, whether in prose or verse, is generally non-deferential. One letter to a patron asks, Shall I pay my Adorations to your Rank, your Fortune, or the good Dinners you give me?
Jones, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Dodsley, 1750.
275
Textual Features
Mary Jones
MJ
's letters cover the period from 1732 to 1748, from the writer's mid twenties till she was just over forty. Like her poems themselves they are full of the business of poetry and authorship...
Textual Features
Dorothea Du Bois
After seven pages on grammar, she offers pattern letters: those in verse are in effect an anthology of epistolary poems by women, a patriotically generous selection of Irish writers (Mary Monck
, Mary Barber
Textual Production
Constantia Grierson
CG
's earliest poems were written to Laetitia Pilkington
before either of them were married; compliments to Barber
came later.
Elias, A. C. “A Manuscript of Constantia Grierson’s”. Swift Studies, Vol.
2
, pp. 33-56.
33n3
Lavoie, Chantel Michelle. Poems by Eminent Ladies: A Study of an Eighteenth-Century Anthology. University of Toronto, 1999.
217, 219
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Barber, Mary, Jonathan Swift, and Constantia Grierson. Poems on Several Occasions. C. Rivington, 1734.