Mary Reid

Mary Reid (1769-1839) was the daughter of Matthew Reid and Mary Atchison Reid of Leicester. One brother, also named Matthew, was a merchant in Leicester; another brother, John (1773-1822) was a Unitarian physician who settled in London in 1795 and became an acquaintance of many of the early Romantic writers, such as Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, Hazlitt, Lloyd, and a young Henry Crabb Robinson. John Reid was also a friend of Dr. Richard Pulteney (1730-1801), formerly of Leicester and later at Blandford, Dorset, and a prominent member of the Linnean Society. Like her friend Elizabeth Coltman, Mary Reid also joined the congregation at Harvey Lane after the arrival of Robert Hall in 1807. Like Coltman, Reid never married, rejecting numerous suitors, including the poet James Graham. After the death of her brother in 1822, she inherited a considerable amount of property, both in Leicester and Glasgow, where her father had originated. According to Glasgow historian, Robert Reid, 'Miss Mary Reid was a literary lady, and was spoken of as blue stocking in my early days' (55). She was a close  friend of Susanna Watts and Elizabeth Heyrick, Elizabeth Benger, and Susanna Watts, even spending three weeks in the Lake District in 1802 with the latter. 'She was also', Reid adds, 'a keen politician, of the Foxite school', all of which would have placed her in good company with her friends, Mary Steele and Elizabeth Coltman.  As to Reid's appreciation for Steele, she left these words in a letter to Coltman after Steele's death: 'I have moments of more exquisite & delightful feeling in thinking over the virtues of order dear friend, than in associating with any living one'. For more on Mary Reid, see Robert Reid [Senex], Old Glasgow and its Environs (Glasgow: David Robertson; London: Longman, 1864), 55; Leicestershire Record Office, 15D56/449; also Timothy Whelan, Other British Voices: Women, Poetry, and Religion, 1766-1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 162-70, 187-89; for Mary Steele's 1807 friendship poem to Reid, see Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, 3.162.