Author: JONES (Mary):
Title: Miscellanies in Prose and Verse.
Description: Oxford Printed; and delivered by Mr. Dodsley..., Mr. Clements in Oxford..., and Mr. Frederick in Bath, 1750. FIRST EDITION. 8vo, 210 x 128 mms., pp. vi, [ix] - lv [lvi blank], including list of over 1400 subscribers, recently rebound in plain gray boards, cream paper label spine. A good copy. Mary Jones (1707 - 1778) was born in Oxford, and how she managed to collect 1400 subscribers to this volume is unclear. Although she had friends in high places, her own domestic life seems to have been spent mostly with her brother. However, she came to the attention of the literati and the glitterati of mid-18th century England. She met Samuel Johnson, who called her "the chantress," alluding to her brother's post as Chanter of Christ Church Cathedral. Ralph Griffith reviewed this volume in 1752 in The Monthly Review and described Jones as "the best woman writer since Katherine Phillips in the seventeenth century." Roger Lonsdale describes her as "one of the most intelligent and amusing women writers of her period." The Feminist Companion to Literature in English concurs; "her poems [are] colloquial, sinewy, satirical, sometimes risqué; her letters to women confront their situation both bleakly and playfully." Foxon I. p.391. Rothschild 1280. Lonsdale: Eighteenth Century Women Poets p.155-165, Janet Todd: A Dictionary of British and American Women Poets p.181.

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