Mary Leapor was born on February 26,1722 in Northamptonshire. Mary Leapor was an only child. Her father worked in the gardens in Brackley so she spent a majority of her time there as a child. At a very young age of 10, Mary started to write and her parents highly discouraged doing so. This was an interesting point that I have read. She was looked at to be the greatest female poet of her time, and her parents discouraged it. She “probably” attended the local school of Brackley. Getting into Mary’s teen years, she got a job working as a kitchen maid at Weston Hall, which was near Brackley, where she had resources available to her in the library. After that job, she took on another job of similar nature but instead in a man’s family in the Edgcote House. She lived in Crumble Hall, which she wrote a poem on later in life. In the year of 1745, Leapor returned to Brackley into her original house with her father. During this time she met a lady named Bridget Freemantle who helped shape her life. Freemantle read one of Leapor’s verses that she had wrote and tried to submit it for a play in a tragedy she composed. Before the verses could be turned into anything significant, Mary Leapor became very ill with measles at the age of 24. She was buried in Brackley on November 14, 1746.
Leaper’s verses can be compared to those of Pope and Swift. Mary Leapor is one of the leading women poets of her century. Her poems are shaped by her experiences as an outsider economically and as a woman of her day. Being that she was female, it is impressive to look at how far she was able to go with her writing. She did not have the advantages of what a male may have gotten in her day or even the advantage of having money to help her. It is interesting to note how she grew up in a lower class, working for people of more wealth than her. Going against her parents’ word, she kept writing. I would say that it is possible that her parents discouraging her led her to wanting to write more. Fortunately for her, this helped shape her as a writer which led to her being considered one of the greatest female poets of her century.
WORKS CITED
Greene, Mary Leapor: a study in eighteenth-century women’s poetry (1993) · M. Leapor, Poems on several occasions, 2 vols.(1748–51)· parish register, Brackley, Northants. RO · GM, 1st ser., 54 (1784) · B. W. Rizzo, ‘Christopher Smart, the “C.S.” poems, and Molly Leapor’s epitaph’, The Library, 6th ser., 5 (1983), 22–31 · G. Sitwell, A brief history of Weston Hall, Northamptonshire (1927)
Stuart Gillespie, ‘Leapor, Mary (1722–1746)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16246, accessed 9 Oct 2017]