Mary Collier (1688–1762) was an English poet, perhaps best known for The Woman's Labour, a poem described by one commentator as a "plebeian female georgic that is also a protofeminist polemic."

Life

Little is known of Collier's early life other than what she wrote in the "remarks on the author's life drawn by herself" which prefaced her Poems on Several Occasions (1762). She was from Midhurst or Lodsworth, West Sussex, born to poor parents, and educated at home. She worked as a washer-woman, brewer, and at other various jobs. In the 1720s she moved to Hampshire in search of employment. Collier initially wrote poems for her own amusement with no intent to publish; she would recite the poems to entertain her listeners, and thus brought attention to her talents. Apparently a family that employed her encouraged her to publish. She had no known dependants and supported herself through her work, so she was able to adopt what one commentator called a "feisty tone."

Poetry

As she recounts in the preface to her 1762 collection, she was outraged when she read Stephen Duck's The Thresher's Labour (1730) and in response to his apparent disdain for labouring-class women, wrote the 246-line "powerful modern georgic" for which she is best remembered, The Woman's Labour: an Epistle to Mr Stephen Duck. In her riposte, she catalogues the daily tasks of a working woman, both outside the home and, at the end of the day, within the home as well: A second poem was printed with the Epistle to Mr. Duck. The Three Sentences is a paraphrase of the tale of the Darius contest told in 1 Esdras. Landry (1990) asserts that Collier "tends to couple moral reformism with a certain amiable accommodationism, or compliance with the will of fathers." Keegan claims this poem "suggests yet denies feminist and democratizing class politics. . . . and indeed the poem as a whole ends with a pious expression of the poet's submission to divine will." Collier is an important figure in the self-taught, labouring-class tradition in eighteenth-century poetry, a tradition which also includes Duck, as well as Ann Yearsley, Mary Leapor, and others. Collier, Duck, and other working-class poets from rural Great Britain were responding in part to the economic upheavals in the countryside brought about by the enclosures of agricultural land and the consequent unemployment. Duck's depiction of female labourers as lazy and feckless characters particularly infuriated Collier during a period when women field labourers often lost out to men in tight rural employment markets. Collier did not make much money from her poetry and worked as a washer-woman until she was sixty-three. She continued working at other jobs for seven more years until, in poor health, she retired at age seventy and died two years later in Alton.

Works

Resources

Etexts

(Petersfield: W. Minchin, 1820). (Google Books)