Mary Scott, poet (–1793)

Mary Scott was the daughter of a linen draper. Little else is known about her life before the publication of her poem The Female Advocate in 1774. It consisted of 522 lines of rhyming couplets and discussed contemporary writers including Lucy Aikin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Fielding, Anne Killigrew, Catherine Macaulay, Catherine Parr, Helen Maria Williams, and Phillis Wheatley. Her friend Anna Seward's published letters are the source of what little is known of Mary Scott's life. In the preface to The Female Advocate, Mary Scott mentioned ill-health, and she seems to have been a semi-invalid for years. She lived with her parents until she was in her thirties, caring for her sick mother until her death in 1787. Mary's father died the following year, and Mary was then free after more than a decade of courtship to marry John Taylor.
She underwent great stress when her husband, who had formerly convinced her to become a Unitarian, subsequently embraced Quakerism. Mary 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 at age 41.