The Women Writers of the Steele Circle, 1720–1840 

The Steele circle originated in the West Country of England in the early 1700s and eventually stretched to Bristol, Southampton, London, and Leicester. The first generation was led by the diarist Anne Cator Steele (1689–1760), wife of William Steele III (1685–1769), Baptist minister at Broughton, Hampshire; she was joined by her talented stepdaughter and poet, Anne Steele (1717–78), who published Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional in 1760 under the nom de plume “Theodosia,” and another daughter, Mary Steele Wakeford (1724–72), also a gifted poet. The central figure in the second generation was Mary Steele (later Dunscombe) (1753–1813), Anne Cator Steele’s granddaughter and Anne Steele’s niece, author of Danebury; or The Power of Friendship, A Tale. With Two Odes, which appeared anonymously in 1779. The younger Steele’s reputation as a poet, though eclipsed by (and later confused with) that of Anne Steele, was sufficient to sustain her own coterie of literary friends, including Mary Scott (later Taylor) (1751–93) of Milborne Port; Somerset, author of the poems The Female Advocate (1774) and Messiah: A Poem (1788); Jane Attwater (later Blatch) (1753–1843) and her sister, Marianna Attwater (later Head) (1742?–1832), of Bodenham, near Salisbury—the former a prolific diarist and the latter a clever poet; and Elizabeth Coltman (1761–1838) of Leicester, Mary Steele’s closest literary friend after the death of Mary Scott and who was herself a poet, periodical writer, and author of moral and political tracts between 1799 and 1820. The third generation centered upon the poet Maria Grace Andrews Saffery (1772–1858) and her sister Anne (1774–1865). They moved to Salisbury from London in the early 1790s and, through their marriages, became friends and relations of the Steele and Attwater families. Maria Grace, the second wife of John Saffery (1763–1825), Particular Baptist minister at Salisbury, published Cheyt Sing (1790), a narrative poem composed when she was 15; The Noble Enthusiast (1792), a Minerva Press novel; and Poems on Sacred Subjects (1834).

        Until recently, most of the writings of the Steele circle have remained in manuscript, preserved by their descendants for more than two centuries. In 2011, after six years of labor in discovering, uncovering, rescuing, transcribing, and calendaring huge sections of the Steele, Reeves, Attwater, Whitaker, and Saffery collections in the Angus Library and the Bodleian in Oxford, as well as several other archives, the majority of these materials appeared in print for the first time in my 8-volume series,  Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011). These volumes (assisted by Dr. Julia B. Griffin in vols. 1-2), comprise the first published collection of a massive trove of letters, diaries, and poetry by a group of Nonconformist women writers (mostly Baptists, with two Evangelical Anglican women included) that had previously only been known in manuscript form, with portions of the materials not previously examined. These writings—whether published anonymously, under a nom de plume, or left as a manuscript—became the primary artifacts of a religious and literary culture that, despite its constraints, promoted a competence and independence in its women writers that belies “inferiority” or “subordination.” As Nonconformist women, their writings were valorized within their culture as if they were a popular literary gazette, only in this instance, these women served as the gazette’s subjects as well as its editors and archivists. The primary audience was the circle itself, but men are frequent participants and eager readers. The works of these women, preserved by their descendants and gifted to archives, can now be read by students and scholars around the world in the volumes of Nonconformist Women Writers. These volumes attempt to restore the lives, thoughts, passions, and faith of these women to a new generation of readers who, though separated by two centuries, can still relate to the ideals, the struggles, and the achievements of this remarkable group of Nonconformist women. [The most detailed and accurate biographical accounts and explorations of the writings of Mary Steele, Mary Scott, Jane Attwater, and Elizabeth Coltman can be found in Timothy Whelan, Other British Voices: Women, Poetry, and Religion, 1766-1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)].  

      The women of the Steele circle, because of their allegiance to certain theological and ecclesiastical doctrines, lived outside the established Church of England. As Nonconformists, their religious culture was marked by distinctive church policies, educational practices, business enterprises, and attitudes toward literature, the arts, and social and political reform. Dissenting congregations, established by church “covenants,” existed as “gathered communities” united by their adherence to scripture over church traditions, an individual faith rather than a historic creed. Among Independent and Particular Baptist congregations, Calvinism remained the primary doctrinal position for much of the eighteenth century, doctrines previously codified in the Westminster Confession and Catechism (1647–48) and the London Baptist Confession (1689). The women of the Steele circle emerged primarily from these two denominations, both agreeing in doctrine but differing in the sacrament of baptism. Independents were paedobaptists (baptizing infants), whereas Particular Baptists were immersionists, practicing what became known as “believers’ baptism,” which generally occurred after the individual, whether male or female, had reached adolescence or adulthood. More important than age, however, was the spiritual maturity of the applicant, for in order to become a member of either denomination, an applicant had to give a satisfactory “account” of his or her conversion experience and profession of faith. Anne Steele gave hers before the Baptist congregation at Broughton when she was 15 and Jane Attwater at Salisbury in her early twenties. Mary Steele, however, delayed hers until she was 42, though she attended faithfully at Broughton her entire life.

      Manuscript poetry and various forms of life writing central to the Steele circle have long been marginalized by historians of British nonconformity who have privileged church records and pastoral biographies over informal sources like letters and diaries pertaining to the laity, especially women. These rare manuscript and print sources allow us to recreate the literary and cultural life of Nonconformist women who, as conscious literary artists, valued the act of recording their lives on paper, even when the audience consisted only of close friends and family or, in some cases, no one at all, merely the privacy of their own closet. As teenagers, Mary Steele, Mary Scott, Elizabeth Coltman, and Maria Grace Andrews Saffery had already imbibed from their families the belief that literary talents should be encouraged in women even at the expense of domestic duties. In the Steele home at Broughton, for instance, education was a requirement, along with a devotion to reading and composing poetry. The poetry of Milton, Pope, and Watts was to these women as close to divine expression as was humanly possible; it was genteel, decorous, and the most elegant form of subjective expression and sensibility. The women of the Steele circle would have welcomed James Fordyce’s praise of poetry and female faculties, though it is unlikely they would have agreed with all his strictures on women. As Mary Scott writes in the dedicatory epistle to The Female Advocate, “It is a duty absolutely incumbent on every woman whom nature hath blest with talents of what kind soever they may be, to improve them; and that that is much oftener the case than it is usually supposed to be.” (see Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, 4: 30).

        Improving their literary “talents,” however, did not always enhance their likelihood of marriage, for many Nonconformist women writers either never married or married late in life. What did improve their literary ability and, more importantly, their sociability were the intense friendships they formed in their youth, all emanating from within tightly woven familial, social, and literary communities. Female friendship dominates the poetry and correspondence of the Steele circle and most groups of Nonconformist women writers in the eighteenth century. Steele’s Danebury and Scott’s The Female Advocate both developed from conversations between the two teenage friends in the mid-1760s. By 1768 Steele had composed her poem about a friendship between two young women in which one sacrifices her life for the other, only to be miraculously restored to life, and Scott had conducted much of her research for her poem, a historical account of intellectual and artistic achievements by 50 women. The friendship poems that passed between Steele and Scott and the other members of the Steele circle reflect the personal exposure, mutual nurturing, and, to a degree, societal resistance indicative of this genre of women’s poetry in the last half of the eighteenth century.

  Anne Steele had a profound influence upon those within her own circle of literary friends as well as those of her niece, Mary Steele, and her circle of friends, though the second generation diverged widely from the original circle around Anne Steele. Best known in her day as "Theodosia," Anne Steele never married, devoting her life to her poetry and extended family at Broughton. She achieved considerable acclaim for Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional (London, 1760), reprinted in Bristol in 1780 in a posthumous edition of the same title, which also added a third volume, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Verse and Prose, both editions published under her nom de plume. The majority of her poems were hymns, which gained immediate popularity, catapulting her into prominence as the leading woman hymn writer of the eighteenth century. [For the complete texts of her 62 hymns that appeared in The Bristol Collection in 1769, click here.] These hymns, both doctrinal and experiential, exhibit Steele’s adherence to a strict form of Calvinism that was pervasive among Particular Baptists (and some Independents) during the first half of the eighteenth century. Her hymns explore the themes of faith, grace, affliction, duty, death, heaven, and divine inscrutability, as well as such cardinal tenets of Calvinism as Imputed Righteousness, Justification, Sanctification, and the Trinity. Steele’s unpublished poetry is more secular, including some witty dialogues between her and her sister and their ministerial friends about love, marriage, poetry, and the effects of time; poems about friendship, nature, and death; and numerous occasional poems, including a delightfully witty request of her father to move the family’s outhouse so as not to be in view from the window in front of her writing desk! [For the text of this poem, click here]. The secularity of Steele’s manuscript poetry, however, is not uncommon among Nonconformist women poets, for even Bradstreet the Puritan wrote suggestive love poems to her husband as well as poems in praise of Queen Elizabeth and Philip Sidney. What is of greater interest are Steele’s dialogues led by “Silviana,” her witty private persona who determines the topic, moderates the discussion, and ultimately mediates the dialogue between herself and a party of characters that included her sister Mary (“Amira”) and her brother William Steele IV (“Philander”) as well as some Dissenting ministers (“Lysander” and “Lucius”), all of whom enjoyed these playful escapades with the talented (and partially seductive) Silviana, the grand editor and final arbiter of the dialogue. [For the texts of two of Anne Steele's dialogues, click here and here]. Anne Steele’s poetry and prose, most of which was composed between 1740 and 1770, not only expanded the boundaries of Nonconformist women’s poetry and prose but also established, through her dialogues, a model that would culminate in Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785).

        Mary Steele followed her aunt’s example and became the center of the second generation, her stature as poet within the circle eventually surpassing that of Mary Scott. Steele’s 143 poems, along with her spiritual autobiography and several prose writings, all composed between 1766 and 1811, comprise a formidable canon, comparable in number to the collected poems of Charlotte Smith and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Steele surpasses Smith and Barbauld, however, in the variety of genres she employs and the scope of her development as a poet. Steele provides dates and locations for nearly every poem, creating a detailed chronology of a poetic career that began at 13 and continued until shortly before her death at the age of 60. Her attention to time and place reflects the autobiographical nature of scribal poetry common to eighteenth-century female literary coteries, each poem representing a “spot of time” that could easily have found its way into a diary or a letter. Steele’s poetry also crosses the traditional boundaries of Neoclassicism, Sentimentality, and Romanticism, though she never restricted herself to these artificial constructs, developing her poetic voice independent of any school, seeking to please her private literary circle more than any public audience. Her poem, “On being presented by Miss Coltman with an Eolian Harp made by Robert Bloomfield, 1807,” possibly her finest poetic effort, is a remarkably succinct blend of friendship and Romantic contemplation in nature (another link, in some respects, with Anne Bradstreet). [For the text of this poem, click here.]

      As the leader of a vibrant circle of women writers, Mary Steele expanded the model of the evangelical Nonconformist woman-poet established by Bradstreet, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Anne Steele, experimenting with a broad range of poetic and prose genres that gave voice to numerous concerns of women during the last half of the eighteenth century, including courtship, marriage, female friendship, death, war, and spirituality. Mary Steele composed only a few religious poems, but in them she echoes some of the prominent emphases of the faith she inherited from her aunt, including a persistent reliance upon divine sovereignty and control over human affairs along with the primacy of spiritual mediation through nature. In 1799, Elizabeth Coltman began writing short moral and evangelical fiction aimed at young readers (especially among the poor), becoming a pioneering voice among Nonconformist women writers in that genre and author of one of the most widely distributed publications by the Religious Tract Society in the nineteenth century. Jane Attwater, in her occasional poetry, letters, meditative discourses, and personal diary, is almost exclusively a religious writer, experimenting with masculine forms of sermonic discourse while also creating one of the most vivid and comprehensive spiritual autobiographies of any Nonconformist woman writer of the eighteenth century.

Nonconformist Women and Life Writing

A substantial body of “life writings” composed by the women of the Steele circle has survived for more than two centuries, including numerous autobiographical poems, prose meditations, letters, diaries/journals, spiritual autobiographies, and other forms of informal discourse. Nonconformist women were avid readers of spiritual autobiographies, both published and unpublished, which circulated among family members, friends, and church congregations. The women writers of the Steele circle did not possess a fragmented or isolated perspective on life or their life writings; instead, they espoused a worldview that saw all aspects of human activity as a whole, believing, with Calvin, that all events—past, present, and future, not merely those of any given 24-hour day—are foreordained through the omnipotence and omniscience of a sovereign God and, therefore, worth contemplating and recording in their diaries. The notion of a reader confronting the text of someone’s diary would not have been foreign to Nonconformist writers (certainly not to Jane Attwater); what would have been more common, however, is the Nonconformist diarist confronting his or her own text, a text that stood before the individual both as a record of the flawed physical self and a barrier to the writer’s ideal spiritual self. Thus, for Nonconformist women writers, keeping a diary as a meditative practice was as reflexive as it was constructive, and the clash between the two often formed the core of their spiritual introspection.

        Nonconformist diaries also provided a forum for conflict between the diarist’s faith and practice within the narrow “gathered” community of believers in which they belonged, as in the case of Mary Steele’s spiritual autobiography, to doctrinal differences within her own family and denomination [for the complete text of her spiritual autobiography, click here.] Even in the midst of an overtly gendered society, the women of Other British Voices speak with confidence and authority in their life writings, giving voice to their lives according to a spiritual, not a public, ideal. Uncertainty is as much a constant in their life writings as assurance, not because they do not believe but precisely because their journey toward belief and assurance rarely occurred in a straightforward, linear fashion. The process was inevitably discursive, with undulations the norm, demanding constant attention by the writer on her road to spiritual maturity. Enlisting in the “war with the flesh, the world, and the devil” became for Mary Steele, Mary Scott, Jane Attwater, and Elizabeth Coltman a call to spiritual heroism, with incremental victories and setbacks providing the essence of their life writings. Their life writings, whether poetry or prose, have a confessional quality and became the means whereby these women raised their spiritual “Ebenezers,” embedding in the “white stone” of their private diaries or on loose sheets of paper the verbal pillars that would forever remind them of their hard-fought spiritual victories.

        Whatever the outcome of the particular tribulation, affliction, or trial, the struggles of these women were just as difficult and no less important as any faced by men in the common course of their more traditional “public” careers. In their writings, the women of the Steele circle defined themselves doctrinally and experientially. Even in the face of the most severe trials, such as the death of Mary Steele’s father in 1785, or Jane Attwater’s only child in 1809, these women consistently rose above domestic concerns to engage in a spiritual discourse where gender acquiesces to the transcending spiritual ideals of love, truth, holiness, and faith. These women chronicle in their writings an unyielding reliance upon a vigilant hope and an unrelenting faith that will sustain them in their earthly journey. Attaining the ultimate “prize” (Philippians 3:14) required heroic effort, whether in the midst of health and human activity or the stillness of the deathbed. These eighteenth-century women, as much if not more than the men in their congregations, set a remarkably high standard for attaining such a prized “calling.”

        Besides their obvious religious and literary connections, the women of the Steele circle had a decided interest in politics. These opposed French oppression against the English during the mid-eighteenth century, warned against British intolerance toward the American colonies in the 1770s, supported the abolition of penal laws in England and their restrictions upon Nonconformists, praised the initial ideals of the French Revolution, opposed England’s war against France, and staunchly supported the abolitionist movement, first concerning the slave trade and later slavery itself. In fact, Nonconformity may well have been more conducive to women engaging in political discourse in the home, in private coteries, and even in print than any other segment of British society. In de-gendering the modes of political discourse through the use of informal texts (letters and occasional poetry) and formal printed tracts, the women of the Steele circle did not believe they were jeopardizing their femininity but rather defining and celebrating it. 

        The formal and informal writings of the Steele circle demonstrate an unwavering allegiance to the religious and political Dissenting interests in which these women affiliated the entirety of their lives. They also reveal that, as intelligent, creative, independent women, they were actively engaged in both the private and public spheres of British political culture of their day. Though isolated geographically and culturally, these women possessed extensive literary knowledge, keen understandings of contemporary politics, bold opinions, vivid imaginations, evangelical piety, and a wealth of Romantic sensibility. They fully understood their cultural limitations, yet they never relinquished their prerogative to write their own lives and to bequeath that right to future generations of women through a multiplicity of literary forms and traditions. These women created a vibrant social and artistic circle not bound by social, political, religious, or geographical boundaries. The women of the Steele circle relied upon their proficiency in various forms of formal and informal discourse to record their lives, thoughts, and friendships in a way that men rarely, if ever, equaled, providing a salient legacy for reconstructing an important segment of women’s literary history in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Timothy Whelan