Mary Whateley


Mary Darwall , who sometimes wrote as Harriett Airey, was an English poet and playwright. She was a member of the Shenstone Circle of writers that gathered around William Shenstone in the English Midlands. She later explored subjects that included the nature of female friendship and the place of women writers.

Life and work

Born in Beoley, Worcestershire into the prosperous farming family of William Whateley, Mary Whateley was the youngest of nine children, of whom seven survived infancy. She had little formal education, but by 1759 she was having poems published in The Gentleman's Magazine as Harriett Airey or Airy.
In 1760 Whateley moved to Walsall in Staffordshire to work as a housekeeper to her brother. There her poetry was noticed in 1761 by William Shenstone, who was impressed: "That she has generous and delicate sentiments, as well as ingenuity, may, I think, be fairly concluded from the whole tenor of her Poetry."
Her first volume of Original Poems on Several Occasions appeared from Robert Dodsley in 1764. It held 30 works, including odes and hymns and a satire, "The Power of Destiny", which considers how different her existence would have been had she been born male. It went through several editions in London, Dublin and Walsall. She stands up in a Dedication for the place of women in literature, saying she looks down "with a just contempt on the invidious reflections... of Prejudice" against that. She presents herself also as a foe to negativism: "Nought I condemn but that Excess which clouds/The mental Faculties, to soothe the Sense:/Let Reason, Truth, and Virtue, guide thy Steps,/And ev'ry Blessing Heav'n bestows be thine."
In 1766 Whateley married the widowed clergyman John Darwall, a father of five or six, by whom she had six further children. Despite her family responsibilities and helping her husband to run a printing press, she continued to write, producing hymns for her husband's congregation, and writing a play for a local theatre. At least five of her poems appeared in miscellanies between 1770 and 1785. Liberty: An Elegy, for example, appeared in that form in 1775 and again in 1783. Her poem "Female Friendship", which appeared in The Westminster Magazine in April 1776, puts this in a context of self-sacrificing heterosexual friendship.
On the death of her husband in 1789, Mary Darwall moved to Deritend, Birmingham, and then in 1793 to Newtown in Montgomeryshire, from where she published in 1794 a second collection, Poems on Several Occasions. This included some work by others, probably two of her daughters, one of whom, Elizabeth, would publish The Storm, with Other Poems in 1810, to which Mary in turn is thought to have contributed four poems.
Mary Darwall died in Walsall on 5 December 1825.

Publications