Mary Scott

Mary Scott (1751/52–1793), married name Mary Taylor, was an English poet, born in Milborne Port, Somerset. She wrote The Female Advocate (1774) in defence of women writing. Life and work Scott's father was a linen draper. Not much else is known about her life before the publication of The Female Advocate, dedicated to her friend Mary Steele, in 1774. Scott credits John Duncombe's The Feminead (1754), a poem in praise of the accomplishments of women writers, as the inspiration for her own poem. 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. Men are also praised: Duncombe; Rev. 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.