Mary Whateley

Mary Darwall (née Whateley, 1738 – 5 December 1825), 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.

Born in Beoley, Worcestershire into the prosperous farming family of William Whateley (1694–1763), 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 under the name Harriett Airey or Airy.

In 1760 Whateley moved to Walsall in Staffordshire to work as a housekeeper for her brother. There her poetry came to the attention in 1761 of William Shenstone, who was highly 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 was published by Robert Dodsley in 1764. It contained 30 works, including odes and hymns and the satire "The Power of Destiny", which contemplated 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 her Dedication against 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.

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