Mary Darwall (née Whateley; 1738 – 5 December 1825), who sometimes wrote as Harriett Airey, was an English poet and playwright.
[1] She had little formal education, but by 1759 she was having poems published in The Gentleman's Magazine as Harriett Airey or Airy.
It held 30 works, including odes and hymns and a satire, "The Power of Destiny", which considers how different her existence would have been had she been born male.
[4] She presents herself also as a foe to negativism: "Nought I condemn but that Excess which clouds/The mental Faculties, to soothe the Sense:/Let Reason, Truth, and Virtue, guide thy Steps,/And ev'ry Blessing Heav'n bestows be thine.
[8] On the death of her husband in 1789, Mary Darwall moved to Deritend, Birmingham, and then in 1793 to Newtown in Montgomeryshire, from where she published in 1794 a second collection, Poems on Several Occasions.