Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Barber
-
Standard Name: Barber, Mary
Birth Name: Mary
Married Name: Mary Barber
Pseudonym: Sapphira
Pseudonym: M. B.
MB
is a domestic, small-scale, early eighteenth-century poet of charm and intelligence (remembered particularly for her writing about her children), but also an incisive, often satirical commentator on social and gender issues. Her single collection of poems was preceded by a number of separately-published pieces, mostly anonymous, not all specifically mentioned here.
Many of MC
's poems are occasional. She writes of female friendship (preferable to marriage, she says), of gardens (her own and those of other people), and praises lines by Mary Barber
.
Friends, Associates
Mary Chandler
MC
seems to have become the real friend of several women of higher rank than herself, some of whom moved from the position of her customers to that of her patrons: they included Lady Hertford
Friends, Associates
Mary Caesar
MC
shared her husband's network of high-level connections in circles of Jacobites
and Jacobite sympathisers. She was a friend of the writers Pope
, Prior
, Swift
, and Mary Barber
, and of the...
politics
Mary Caesar
She acted on her Jacobite principles in attending parliamentary debates, reading the memoirs of statesmen, and visiting Tory detainees in prison. Indeed, though she never questioned that men were intended to manage public affairs, she...
Textual Production
Mary Caesar
MC
told Mary Barber
that she would have liked to write the history of her own times (no doubt, says Rumbold, in opposition to the publication of that title by the Whig Gilbert Burnet
).
Rumbold, Valerie. “The Jacobite vision of Mary Caesar”. Women, Writing, History, 1640-1740, edited by Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman, Batsford, pp. 178-98.