Hannah More called her first encounter with Yearsley positive, saying her writing "excited [her] attention" as it "breathed the genuine spirit of poetry, and [was] rendered still more interesting by a certain natural and strong expression of misery that seemed to fill the head and mind of the author."

More organized subscriptions for Yearsley to publish Poems, on Several Occasions (1785), but its success led to a quarrel between them over access to the trust in which its profits were held.

[6] Yearsley then turned to drama, with Earl Goodwin: an Historical Play (performed in 1789; printed in 1791) and to fiction, with The Royal Captives: a Fragment of Secret History, Copied from an Old Manuscript (1795).

Robert Southey wrote a biography of Ann Yearsley in 1831, calling it an "introductory essay on the lives and works of our uneducated poets".

As Southey notes, Yearsley based her style, grammar and spelling on the limited amounts of literature she had read, which included some Shakespeare plays, Paradise Lost, and Night-Thoughts.

More describes Yearsley as not even having seen a dictionary or knowing anything of grammatical rules, and being bound to "ignorant and vulgar" syntax, yet using language full of metaphor, imagery and personification.