May Drummond

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MD acquired huge fame (both celebration and opprobrium) as a Quaker minister and preacher beginning in the 1730s. She published only one identified slim volume of exhortatory letters and a pamphlet.

Milestones

1709-10
MD was born in Edinburgh, the third and last surviving child of parents who must have been relatively elderly; her father may even have died before she was born.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
28 January 1733
MD penned the epistle to an unknown recipient which she later placed first in her collected volume, Internal Revelation the Source of Saving Knowledge.
Drummond, May. Internal Revelation the Source of Saving Knowledge. 1736.
vii
After May 1736
MD published, with her name, a handful of religious letters under the title of Internal Revelation the Source of Saving Knowledge: Candidly recommended in several Epistles, whose first edition was produced at Reading and sold in London; another appeared at Bristol.
Drummond, May. Internal Revelation the Source of Saving Knowledge. 1736.
vii
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
After 11 July 1766
Disowned by the Society of Friends in both Edinburgh and London, MD issued a self-defensive broadsheet: To the Meeting Assembled in the Chamber at Gracechurch-Street, which appears to be her final publication.
Drummond, May. To the Meeting assembled in the Chamber at Gracechurch-street. 1766.
title-page
Reilly, Matthew. “The Life and Literary Fictions of May Drummond, Quaker Female Preacher”. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, No. 2, pp. 287 -12.
310 and n57
Probably late February 1777
MD died in Edinburgh; the death was reported as last week on 5 March.
Reilly, Matthew. “The Life and Literary Fictions of May Drummond, Quaker Female Preacher”. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, No. 2, pp. 287 -12.
288n1

Biography

Birth and Family

1709-10
MD was born in Edinburgh, the third and last surviving child of parents who must have been relatively elderly; her father may even have died before she was born.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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