Mary Leadbeater

ML 's name is identified with that of the Quaker village of Ballitore in County Kildare, whose cultural historian she was throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Though this Irish author wrote poetry from youth to old age, she is best known as a life-writer (both of her family, her co-religionists and the poor of Ireland) and, increasingly, as a political commentator with links to Edmund Burke and Madame Roland . She based her autobiography on her own diary, and also published dialogues and short fiction (which, though didactic and moralistic, are also tactfully sympathetic), and edited writings by both her parents.