Ann Yearsley, née Cromartie (8 July 1753 – 6 May 1806), also known as Lactilla, was an English poet and writer from the labouring class, in Bristol. The poet
Robert Southey
Robert Southey ( or ; 12 August 1774 – 21 March 1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school, and Poet Laureate from 1813 until his death. Like the other Lake Poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey began as a ...
wrote a biography of her.
Personal life
Born in
Bristol
Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city i ...
to John and Anne Cromartie, Ann worked in childhood as a milkwoman, like her mother. She received no formal education, but her brother taught her to write. She married John Yearsley, a yeoman, in 1774. A decade later the family was rescued from destitution by the charity of
Hannah More
Hannah More (2 February 1745 – 7 September 1833) was an English religious writer, philanthropist, poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, who wrote on moral and religious subjects. Born in Bristol, she taught at a ...
and others.
Yearsley was among the noted Bristol women to campaign against the
Bristol slave trade
upStatue of slave trader The Centre, Bristol">The Centre, Bristol, erected in 1895, Statue of Edward Colston#Toppling and removal">toppled in 2020
Bristol, a port city in south-west England, was involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Brist ...
. In other respects her politics have been described as conservative.
Yearsley's husband died in 1803. She died in 1806 at
Melksham
Melksham () is a town on the River Avon in Wiltshire, England, about northeast of Trowbridge and south of Chippenham. At the 2011 census, the Melksham built-up area had a population of 19,357, making it Wiltshire's fifth-largest settlement af ...
near
Trowbridge
Trowbridge ( ) is the county town of Wiltshire, England, on the River Biss in the west of the county. It is near the border with Somerset and lies southeast of Bath, 31 miles (49 km) southwest of Swindon and 20 miles (32 km) southe ...
,
Wiltshire
Wiltshire (; abbreviated Wilts) is a historic and ceremonial county in South West England with an area of . It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset to the southwest, Somerset to the west, Hampshire to the southeast, Gloucestershir ...
. Her grave can be found in Birdcage Walk,
Clifton, Bristol
Clifton is both a suburb of Bristol, England, and the name of one of the city's thirty-five council wards. The Clifton ward also includes the areas of Cliftonwood and Hotwells. The eastern part of the suburb lies within the ward of Clifton D ...
.
Writings
Hannah More called her first encounter with Yearsley positive, saying her writing "excited
erattention" as it "breathed the genuine spirit of poetry, and
asrendered still more interesting by a certain natural and strong expression of misery that seemed to fill the head and mind of the author." More organized subscriptions for Yearsley to publish ''Poems, on Several Occasions'' (1785), but its success led to a quarrel between them over access to the trust in which its profits were held. Yearsley included her account of the quarrel in an "autobiographical narrative" appended to a fourth, 1786 edition of the poems.
Now supported by
Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol
Frederick Augustus Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, (1 August 1730 – 8 July 1803), was an 18th-century Anglican prelate.
Elected Bishop of Cloyne in 1767 and translated to the see of Derry in 1768, Hervey served as Lord Bishop of Derry unti ...
, Yearsley published ''Poems, on Various Subjects'' in 1787. ''A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade'' appeared in 1788. The latter was seen by many critics to rival a similar poem by her ex-patron Hannah More, entitled "Slavery: A Poem".
Yearsley then turned to drama, with ''Earl Goodwin: an Historical Play'' (performed in 1789; printed in 1791) and to fiction, with ''The Royal Captives: a Fragment of Secret History, Copied from an Old Manuscript'' (1795). Her final poetry collection, ''The Rural Lyre'', appeared in 1796.
Southey's biography
Robert Southey wrote a biography of Ann Yearsley in 1831, calling it an "introductory essay on the lives and works of our uneducated poets". It describes the first encounter that Hannah More had with Ann Yearsley and her general impressions of her capacity as a writer and poet.
As Southey notes, Yearsley based her style, grammar and spelling on the limited amounts of literature she had read, which included some Shakespeare plays, ''
Paradise Lost
''Paradise Lost'' is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–1674). The first version, published in 1667, consists of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674 ...
'', and ''
Night-Thoughts
''The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality'', better known simply as ''Night-Thoughts'', is a long poem by Edward Young published in nine parts (or "nights") between 1742 and 1745. It was illustrated with notable engrav ...
''. More describes Yearsley as not even having seen a dictionary or knowing anything of grammatical rules, and being bound to "ignorant and vulgar" syntax, yet using language full of metaphor, imagery and personification. More described herself as striving to save Yearsley from the vanity of fame, and was more concerned about providing food for her than making her known. Their eventual disagreement over money left the two estranged. According to the critic Jonathan Rose, More was repeatedly startled when the milkmaid drew on classical sources for a work. Plebeian poets were usually confined to a ghetto of folk poetry in a period of strong class prejudice.
Southey described Yearsley as a writer "gifted with voice", yet she "had no strain of her own whereby to be remembered." He also stated that for a time before her death she was reported to be deranged, though there is no corroboration of this.
Works
*''Poems, on Several Occasions'' (1st edition, with a preface by
Hannah More
Hannah More (2 February 1745 – 7 September 1833) was an English religious writer, philanthropist, poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, who wrote on moral and religious subjects. Born in Bristol, she taught at a ...
, 1785)
Etexts
*''Poems, on Several Occasions'' (4th edition, with a new preface by Yearsley, 1786)
*''Poems, on Various Subjects'' (1787)
*''A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade'' (1788)
*''Stanzas of Woe'' (1790)
*''Earl Godwin: An Historical Play'' (performed 1789; printed 1791)
*''The Royal Captives: a Fragment of Secret History, Copied from an Old Manuscript'' (4 vols., 1795)
*''The Rural Lyre: a Volume of Poems'' (1796)
References
Further reading
*Kerri Andrews (2013
''Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, patronage and poetry : the story of a literary relationship'' London: Pickering & Chatto. .
OCLC
OCLC, Inc., doing business as OCLC, See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It wa ...
br>
859159190*Mary Waldron (1996), ''Lactilla, milkwoman of Clifton: the life and writings of Ann Yearsley, 1753–1806''
*Ann Yearsley (2014), ''The Collected Works of Ann Yearsley.'' ed. Kerri Andrews. London: Pickering and Chatto. .
OCLC
OCLC, Inc., doing business as OCLC, See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It wa ...
br>
863174134
See also
*
List of 18th-century British working-class writers
This list focuses on published authors whose working-class status or background was part of their literary reputation. These were, in the main, writers without access to formal education, so they were either autodidacts or had mentors or patron ...
External links
Ann Yearsleyat th
Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA)*Mary Waldron
'Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)' ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 12 November 2006
*Brycchan Carey
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yearsley, Ann
English women poets
English women novelists
English abolitionists
Writers from Bristol
English women dramatists and playwrights
18th-century British women writers
1753 births
1806 deaths