Lucy Kent

Lucy (‘Lucinda’) Kent (1746-1806) was the daughter of Josiah Kent and his first wife, Martha (d. 1747). They were relations of John Kent (1707-96), a lay preacher in the Broughton church, who married Sarah Etheredge (d. 1791), granddaughter of Henry Steele and William Steele IV’s first cousin. Hence, Lucy was a relation of Mary Steele. Her father worked for William Steele and at some point, most likely after the death of the first Mrs. Steele in 1762, Lucy became a permanent resident at Broughton House, assisting in house duties and the care of young Mary. Another possibility is that Lucy arrived in 1769 to assist the second Mrs. Steele in caring for her new daughter, Anne. Lucy Kent, like many of the women in the Steele circle, never married. Living in another household was not uncommon for a single woman, who often served as a companion to a married woman or, in some cases, as a personal servant. Martha Steele, Mary’s youngest half-sister, also never married, living all of her adult life with her sister, Anne. For Mary Steele’s tribute poems to Lucy Kent, see Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, vol. 3. For more on spinsterhood, see Olwen Hufton, ‘Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Family History 9 (1984), 355-76; Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).