Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Palmer
-
Standard Name: Palmer, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Reynolds
Pseudonym: A Lady
Nickname: Molly
Nickname: Polly
MP
wrote, in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, some lively dialogues which may be the earliest literary writing to use the local dialect of Devon. They remained unpublished for nearly a hundred years. She was said too to have written poetry.
Of her five sisters, Mary (later Palmer)
and Elizabeth (later Johnson) both married and settled in Devon near their childhood home. Mary wrote some interesting dialogues in Devon dialect; Elizabeth wrote a doctrinaire religious treatise...
Friends, Associates
Phillis Wheatley
Those she met in London included the Countess of Huntingdon, religious leader, and Mary Palmer
(dialect writer, sister of Frances Reynolds and Sir Joshua, whom Wheatley calls a poetess, and accomplished lady.
She had begun work on this as soon as she moved back north. Her full title is The Westmorland Dialect, In three familiar dialogues, In which an attempt is made to illustrate the provincial idiom...
Residence
Frances Reynolds
In late 1779 or 1780 FR
actually moved out of her brother's London house to another property he owned, Wick House at Richmond in Surrey.
Ashmore, Helen. “’Do Not, My Love, Burn Your Papers’: Samuel Johnson and Frances Reynolds: A New Document”. The Age of Johnson, edited by Paul J. Korshin, pp. 165 - 94.
190-1n14
Wendorf, Richard, and Charles Ryskamp. “A Blue-Stocking Friendship: The Letters of Elizabeth Montagu and Frances Reynolds in the Princeton Collection”. Princeton University Library Chronicle, No. 3, pp. 173 -07.
181
Wendorf, Richard. Sir Joshua Reynolds. Harvard University Press, 1996.