Yearsley, Ann (1752–1806)

English poet and playwright. Name variations: Lactilla; "Milkwoman of Bristol." Born Ann Cromartie in Clifton, near Bristol, England, in July 1752 (some sources cite 1753 and 1756); died in Melksham, Wilt-shire, on May 8, 1806; daughter of John Cromartie (a laborer) and Ann Cromartie (a milkwoman); married John Yearsley, in 1774; children: six (one died young).

Selected writings:

Poems on Several Occasions (1785); Poems on Various Subjects (1787); A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade (1788); Stanzas of Woe, Addressed from the Heart on a Bed of Illness to Levi Eames, Esq. Late Mayor of the City of Bristol (1790); Earl Goodwin: An Historical Play, Performed with General Applause at the Theatre-Royal, Bristol (1791); Reflections on the Death of Louis XVI (1793); Sequel to Reflections on the Death of Louis XVI (1793); Catalogue of the Books, Tracts, &c. Contained in Ann Yearsley's Public Library, No. 4, Crescent, Hotwells (1793); An Elegy on Marie Antoinette , of Austria, Ci-Devant Queen of France: With a Poem on the Last Interview between the King of Poland and Loraski (1793); The Royal Captives: A Fragment of Secret History. Copied from an Old Manuscript (4 vols., 1795); The Rural Lyre: A Volume of Poems (1796).

Poet and playwright Ann Yearsley was born in 1752 in Clifton, near Bristol, England, to John Cromartie, a laborer, and Ann Cromartie , who had a milk route which her daughter would inherit. Although Yearsley received no formal education, she learned to read at a young age and her brother taught her how to write. In 1774, encouraged by her parents, she married John Yearsley, an illiterate laborer. Although the marriage was reportedly unhappy, they had six children in seven years, one of whom died. In the hours after work, with her children asleep, she read and wrote poetry.

A decade after marrying, and with her family living in terrible conditions, Yearsley showed her poems to Hannah More who gave her a dictionary and books on grammar and spelling. She also helped Yearsley to revise her work and, with further assistance from Elizabeth Montagu , arranged for publication through subscription of Yearsley's first book, Poems on Several Occasions, in 1784. More than 1,000 subscribers bought the volume, which included an introductory letter from More to Montagu, in which More compliments Yearsley's work. The volume garnered praise from such figures as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, and Dr. Charles Burney.

More and Montagu had joint trusteeship over the proceeds from Yearsley's book, and the relationship between Yearsley and More began to disintegrate over financial issues. The income generated by their investments had been intended to support a school that Yearsley would run. At first pleased with More's aid, Yearsley (as did a number of More's beneficiaries) later rejected her attempts at intellectual and financial control. In her 4th edition of Poems on Several Occasions, published in 1786 with the assistance of Frederick Hervey, bishop of Derry and earl of Bristol, and Anna Seward , who later compared Yearsley's work with that of Robert Burns, Yearsley complained about More in an appended "Autobiographical Narrative." Their differences now public, More accused Yearsley of being ungrateful and malicious, and the end of their collaboration and friendship followed.

In 1787, Yearsley published a new volume of verse, Poems on Various Subjects, attempting to overcome rumors that her previous material had been made publishable only through More's heavy editing. A year later, she issued Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade, and in 1790, she wrote Stanzas of Woe to attack a local mayor who had chastised her children for trespassing on his property. The following year, Yearsley composed Earl Goodwin, a tragedy in verse that was staged in both Bath and Bristol. She also wrote a historical novel, The Royal Captives, based on the story of the Man in the Iron Mask, and several "reflections" and elegies on the unfortunate monarchs of France, which had recently been convulsed by the French Revolution. Her last collection of poems, The Rural Lyre, was published in 1796, and her oldest son, William, an apprentice to an engraver, provided the frontispiece. Yearsley later opened a circulating library in Bristol Hot Wells with the help of a Bristol bookseller and publisher, Joseph Cottle. Yearsley never mended her relationship with More and, after the death of her husband and two of her children, lived in near seclusion. She moved to Melksham, in Wiltshire, to be near one of her sons, and died there on May 8, 1806.

According to Donna Landry , much of Yearsley's work concerns domesticity and the power of women to effect change. "That her work has been so little read when it offers such complex aesthetic and intellectual pleasures suggests what can so easily be lost to the historical record or the literary canon through collective 'forgetting,'" notes Landry. "And it is this forgetting, this repression of particular struggles and forms of political resistance, that recovering and reading Yearsley's work may help to overcome."

sources:

Buck, Claire, ed. The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature. NY: Prentice Hall, 1992.

The Concise Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Landry, Donna. "Ann Yearsley," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 109: Eighteenth-Century British Poets. Detroit, MI: The Gale Group, 1991, pp. 300–307.

Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Susan Wessling , freelance writer, Worcester, Massachusetts