Mary Ann Taylor

Mary Ann Taylor (1789-1875), later Mrs. Robert Scott, was the only daughter of the poet Mary Scott (1751-93). She was born at Ilminster. After her mother’s death at Bristol in 1793, her father, John Taylor, formerly a Presbyterian minister but now a Quaker schoolmaster, removed to Manchester, where she was educated for a time before being sent to a boarding school in Liverpool. During a visit to the West Country in late 1811 and early 1812, she spent several weeks with Mary Steele at Broughton; she also visited Steele’s sister, Anne Steele Tomkins, at Southampton. On this visit Taylor saw for the first time many of her mother’s poems and hymns, most of which had been in the possession of Mary Steele. These materials were later given to Taylor, who, before her death, passed them on to her daughter. They have remained in the possession of members of the Scott family thereafter, but the whereabouts of Mary Scott’s manuscript poetry and letters are currently unknown. After Mary Steele’s death in 1813, Taylor contributed a poem to a memorial book for Steele compiled by Elizabeth Coltman, though these poems are also no longer extant.  In December 1821, Mary Ann Taylor married her cousin, Robert Scott, a chemist at Bath and the son of her mother’s elder brother, Samuel Scott. As with her mother, so Taylor’s marriage was not a happy one. Her sole surviving poem appears in Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 4; some letters to her from her father during her visit to the West Country in 1811-12 can be found in vol. 3 of the same series; see also Isabella and Catherine Scott, A Family Biography A Family Biography 1662 to 1908 (London: James Nesbet & Co., 1908), 104-14.