Mary Isabella Lee

Mary Isabella Lee (; 18 June 18717 August 1939) was a New Zealand servant, dressmaker, coalminer and homemaker. She wrote an autobiography which was published 53 years after her death.

Biography She was born in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, Scotland, on 18 June 1871 and emigrated to Dunedin, New Zealand with her parents Alison or Alice McDonald and Alexander Taylor in 1877. In her later life, she lived with her sons and their families.

The second of her four children, John A. Lee, was a member of parliament for Labour in Auckland East from 1922 to 1928 and in Grey Lynn from 1931 to 1943, forming Democratic Labour in 1940.

Mary Lee wrote an autobiography, The Not So Poor, partly in response to John Lee's fictionalised autobiography, Children of the Poor (1934). Her autobiography was not published until 1992.