Mary Scott (Poet)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Scott's father was a linen draper. Not much else is known about her life before the publication of The Female Advocate, dedicated to her friend Anne Steele, in 1774. Scott credits John Duncombe's The Feminead (1754), a poem in praise of the accomplishments of women writers, as the inspiration for her own poem. The poem consists of 522 lines of rhyming couplets; it supplements Duncombe's, and discusses more contemporary writers. Among the poets referred to are Lucy Aikin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Fielding, Anne Killigrew, Catherine Macaulay, Catherine Parr, and Helen Maria Williams. Men are also praised: Duncombe; Rev. Thomas Seward, author of The Female Right to Literature, in a Letter to a Young Lady from Florence (1766); William Steele, for his support of his daughter's writing; and Richard Pulteney (1730-1801), a friend and physician who encouraged Scott. She began a correspondence with Anna Seward, whose father she had praised in The Female Advocate, and Seward's published letters are the source of much that is known of Scott's life.