SOURCE: Klaus, H. Gustav. “Mary Collier (1688?-1762).” Notes and Queries 47, no. 2 (June 2000): 201-04.

In the following essay, Klaus attempts to clear up long-standing inaccuracies about Collier's biography and comments on questions surrounding various editions of her works.

Mary Collier is one of several eighteenth-century plebeian poets who have been rediscovered, anthologized and discussed since the early 1980s. Some of them, like Mary Leapor and Ann Yearsley, have meanwhile been honoured by a monograph,¹ and almost all of them have made it into one or both of Roger Lonsdale's two Oxford anthologies.²

The absence of letters or famous patrons has made Mary Collier one of the more obscure figures. Previous attempts to shed some light on the author of ‘The Woman's Labour’ (1739) have proved inaccurate or incomplete. Joyce Fullard's entry in A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800, for example, erroneously attributes two poems in The Lady's...