Mary Bryan

Mary Bryan (fl. 1810-25) assumed control of the family business upon her husband’s death in 1814, still operating at 51 Corn Street, Bristol; unfortunately, he died insolvent and she was forced to pay off his debts while supporting six young children. She increased the firm’s business, publishing 24 titles between 1814 and 1825, more than Ann Bryan’s 14 titles during her career and almost as many as her husband did between 1801 and 1814. She also continued to print and sell Baptist titles, especially works by John Ryland, Jr., Baptist minister at Broadmead in Bristol where James and Cottle were members, as well as the Annual Reports of the Bristol Education Society. In 1815, as a means of bolstering her income, she published a book of poems, Sonnets and Metrical Tales, which led to some notoriety and correspondences with William Wordsworth and Walter Scott, the latter spanning the period of 1818 to 1829. In 1820 she married a local doctor; in 1825 they moved to Stowmarket, where in 1829 her novel Longhollow: A Country Tale, appeared under her married name, “Mrs. Bryan Bedingfield.” For more on the Bryans, see Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy, eds., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (London: Batsford, 1990), 153; J. R. de J. Jackson, Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography, 1770-1835 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 43; Michelle Levy, “Woman and Print Culture, 1750-1830,” in The History of British Women’s Writings, 1750-1830, vol. 5, ed. Jacqueline M. Labbe (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 42; and  “Bristol Women in the Long Eighteenth Century c. 1660,” in Women and the City: Bristol 1373-2000, ed. Madge Dresser (Bristol: University of the West of England, 2000), 78; Stuart Curran, “Isabella Lickbarrow and Mary Bryan: Wordsworthian Poets,” Wordsworth Circle 27 (1996), 113-18; and S. A. Ragaz, “Writing to Sir Walter: The Letters of Mary Bryan Bedingfield,” Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 7 (December 2001), online resource (http://www.romtext.org.uk/articles/cc07_n02/).