Mary Scott

Mary Scott (born 19 July 1751, South Petherton, Somerset died 10 June 1793, Somerset), who became Mary Taylor after her marriage, was an English poet originating from Milborne Port, Somerset. Notable for her literary contributions, Scott authored "The Female Advocate" in 1774, a work advocating for women's participation in writing and literature.

Life and work 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 Mary 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, Catharine Macaulay, Catherine Parr, Helen Maria Williams, and Phillis Wheatley.

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. consequently, when her husband, who had formerly convinced her to convert to Unitarianism, embraced Quakerism, she underwent considerable strain. Scott gave birth to a daughter in 1789 and a son in 1791 (her son, John Edward Taylor, went on to found the Manchester Guardian). She died late in her third pregnancy, in 1793, at the age of forty-one.

Works

"Verses Addressed to Miss Seward, on the Publication of her Monody on Major André," The Gentleman's Magazine (June 1783) The Messiah. A Poem, in Two Parts. Published for the benefit of the General Hospital at Bath ([Bath]: R. Cruttwell, 1788.)