Her husband was imprisoned again in 1690 for refusing to pay tythes to the Church of England and Mary petitioned for his release.
The book is a compilation of Mollineux's manuscript poetry put together by her cousin Frances Owen and printed by the female Quaker publisher Tace Sowle.
The poems blend erudition with activism and also develop literary constructions about exile, retreat, and retirement more typical of Katherine Philips and (later) Anne Finch than of Quaker polemicists.
They are largely biblical in inspiration, but there are hints of her classical education therein, particularly in her composition of Latin elegiac couplets.
'A Meditation' (1668), for example, expands on verses from the Book of Lamentations to draw a comparison with the dire situation of Dissenters at that time.