Mary Scott

01 January 1751 - 05 June 1793

As well as an elegy printed during her lifetime and hymns printed after her death in 1793, MS published two ambitious longer poems about whose content she cared passionately: a polemical celebration of women's intellectual achievements (especially as writers), and an epic poem with Christ as hero.

BirthName: Mary Scott
Married: Taylor
MS is not the Mrs Taylor of Manchester who published a text-book entitled An Easy Introduction to General Knowledge and Liberal Education . . . for the Use of Young Ladies in 1791.
Pseudonym: M. S.

Milestones

1751

MS was born at Milborne Port in Somerset.

Some sources put Milborne Port in Dorset. It is close to the border; nearby Milborne St Andrew is in Dorset.

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, 1990.

By September 1774

MS responded to John Duncombe 's Feminead, published twenty years before, with The Female Advocate, dedicated to her friend the poet and hymn-writer Anne Steele .

Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.

38 (1774): 218

5 June 1793

MS died in Bristolunder circumstances of a painfully interesting kind:

“Memoir of Mr. John Edward Taylor”. The Christian Reformer; or, Unitarian Magazine and Review, Vol.

, Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1844, pp. 158-9.

158

which is to say, only three weeks before she was due to bear her third child.

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Background

1751

MS was born at Milborne Port in Somerset.

Some sources put Milborne Port in Dorset. It is close to the border; nearby Milborne St Andrew is in Dorset.

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, 1990.