Mary Collier
-
MC
, writing during the earlier eighteenth century, is the first of the known proletarian women poets. Her best-known work is a powerful modern georgic; she also published occasional poems, some of them proto-feminist, and biblical paraphrase.
Milestones
About early October 1688
MC
was born in Sussex, probably at Lodsworth.
Though both the Feminist Companion and critic Moira Ferguson
give her a birth-date of 1679, Richard Greene
identified her in the Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons volume, 1993, as a baby baptised under this name at Lodsworth (three and a half miles from Midhurst). This fits the age she mentions having attained in her poem on George III's coronation.
Nicholls, C. S., editor. The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons. Oxford University Press.
144
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
225
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
August 1739
MC
published her georgic poem The Woman's Labour: An Epistle to Mr Stephen Duck, as Mary Collier, now a washer-woman, at Petersfield in Hampshire.
Bibliographer David Foxon gives the month of publication as August, and cites the Gentleman's Magazine; but this reference has not been found in August 1738, 1739, or 1740.
Ferguson, Moira. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Nation, Class, and Gender. State University of New York Press.
7
Ferguson, Moira et al. “Introduction”. The Thresher’s Labour and The Woman’s Labour, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, p. iii - xii.
vii
After 8 September 1761
MC
, aged seventy-one, wrote the last datable poem in her volume Poems, on Several Occasions: On the Marriage of George the Third.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under George III
Probably before October 1762
In the year of her death MC
published by subscription, at Winchester, her Poems, on Several Occasions.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
By 20 October 1762
MC
died, presumably at Alton in Hampshire, where she was buried on this date.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Biography
Birth and Family
About early October 1688
MC
was born in Sussex, probably at Lodsworth.
Though both the Feminist Companion and critic Moira Ferguson
give her a birth-date of 1679, Richard Greene
identified her in the Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons volume, 1993, as a baby baptised under this name at Lodsworth (three and a half miles from Midhurst). This fits the age she mentions having attained in her poem on George III's coronation.
Nicholls, C. S., editor. The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons. Oxford University Press.
144
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
225
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.