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, 1993.
144
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
225
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, 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, 1995.
7
Ferguson, Moira, Stephen Duck, and Mary Collier. “Introduction”. The Thresher’s Labour and The Woman’s Labour, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1985, 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, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, 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, 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, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, 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, 1993.
144
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
225
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.