Mary Scott (poet)

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.

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.

Her father died in 1788, and Scott was free after over a decade of courtship to marry John Taylor, a match her mother had opposed when alive.

Scott was part of a circle of Protestant dissenters and was deeply religious;[3] consequently, when her husband, who had formerly convinced her to convert to Unitarianism, embraced Quakerism, she underwent considerable strain.