About this Item
Poems on Several Occasions. By Mary Masters. London, Printed by T. Browne in Bartholomew-Close, for the Author. 1733. Very fine restoration - pages 103 - 120 & 205 - 210 are facsimiles, 8.5 x 5.25 , 267 pp, 8vo. In good condition. Fine half-leather boards are lightly rubbed at edges and leather corners. Title label bright and clean, marbled covered boards bright and clean. Some pencil marginalia on fresh front paste-down. Previous ownership signature, in ink, at top edge of title page Light toning throughout text-block. Modern binding tight and intact. Please see photos and ask questions, if any, before purchasing. Mary Masters (1694?-1771) was a native of Otley, a market town near Leeds, where she appears to have emerged from humble origins. Her father was a petty school-master at Norwich but did not seem to support his daughter s education or her predilection for poetry, as the preface to her first volume, Poems on Several Occasions (1733), makes clear: The Author of the following Poems never read a Treatise of Rhetorick, or an Art of Poetry, nor was ever taught her English Grammar [and]…her Genius to Poetry was always brow-beat and discountenanc d by her Parents. No evidence of a life of labor has survived, though Masters is presented to her potential reading public in 1733 as a self-taught poet who exhibits a natural genius for poetry, implicitly linking her to the fashion for such figures in the wake of Stephen Duck s success in the 1730s. Poems on Several Occasions gathers at least a decade s worth of work, including religious, philosophical, and topographical pieces, as well as many poems celebrating friends. One friend, Thomas Scott, a dissenting minister and hymn writer, also contributed six poems to round out a substantial first volume whose subscribers largely hailed from Norfolk, Suffolk, and the Otley neighborhood. Earliest volume of poems by a woman in English to be issued by subscription! Important female poet who influenced Samuel Johnson. RAREB1733BORH - 01/22 RAREB1733BOPH - 09/24 -HKREV44. Seller Inventory # RAREB1733BOPH
Contact seller
Report this item
