The Female Advocate


Mary Scott's The Female Advocate; a poem occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombe's Feminead is both a celebration of women's literary achievements, as well as an impassioned piece of advocacy for women's right to literary self-expression.

The poem

The Female Advocate takes John Duncombe's The Feminead: or, female genius. A poem as its inspiration. Scott expresses gratitude and admiration for Duncombe, then justifies her own project with her stated wish to expand his original list of "female geniuses", as well as to include some of those who came to prominence since he wrote.
Duncombe's poem is celebratory; it rehearses the accomplishments of women writers of the mid-eighteenth-century. Scott cast further back in time in order to "tell what bright daughters BRITAIN once could boast" and introduces a series of women from the previous two centuries that would have already been familiar to most of her readers, beginning with the learned Protestant sixth wife of Henry VIII, Catherine Parr. She continues chronologically into the quarter-century between when Duncombe's poem was published two decades earlier and the time of her own writing. Her poem combines the tradition of the catalogue of exemplary women that Duncombe follows, with that of another genre that would also have been familiar to her readers: the defence of women.
Scott's poem consists of 522 lines of heroic couplets. It is dedicated to her close friend, Mary Steele, and contains several references to people within their circle.

Names

Pastoral pseudonyms, or noms de plumes, were popular in the eighteenth century, and Scott uses them in this poem, both widely known ones such as "Orinda" for Katherine Philips, as well as pen names employed in a more limited way, within her own circle.
Female writers often published anonymously. Scott includes two anonymous writers in the body of the poem and mentions a third in the introduction.

Literary figures treated in ''The Female Advocate''

In the introduction

In the introduction, Scott mentions four writers who had "started up since the writing of this little piece": Hester Chapone, Hannah More, Phillis Wheatley, and the unnamed author of "poems by a lady" "lately published" by G. Robinson in Paternoster Row. She implies that there is no shortage of subjects: "Authors have appeared with honour, in almost every walk of literature."

In the poem

  1. Catherine Parr : queen consort and author of three works
  2. Jane Grey : reputation for excellent humanist education
  3. Elizabeth Tudor : monarch and sometime poet
  4. Margaret Roper
  5. Elizabeth Dauncey
  6. Cecily Heron
  7. Mary Basset
  8. Anne Seymour
  9. Margaret Seymour
  10. Jane Seymour
  11. Anne Bacon
  12. Elizabeth Russell
  13. Mildred Cooke
  14. Catherine Killigrew
  15. Margaret Rowlett, sister of Ann Bacon, Mildred Cooke, Elizabeth Russell
  16. Margaret Cavendish : philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction writer, playwright
  17. Anne Killigrew : poet and painter
  18. Katherine Philips : poet; also included in Duncombe's The Feminead
  19. Rachel Russell : known for her published correspondence
  20. Mary Monck : poet
  21. Mary Chudleigh : feminist poet and intellectual
  22. Constantia Grierson : editor, poet, classical scholar
  23. Mary Barber : poet
  24. Mary Chandler : poet
  25. Mary Jones : poet
  26. Mary Masters : anthologist/biographer
  27. Elizabeth Cooper : noted by Scott for her edited anthology of poetry, The Muse's Library, with which she "did'st pierce the shades of gothic night" by collecting poetry of earlier periods
  28. Sarah Fielding : novelist
  29. Elizabeth Tollet : poet, philosopher, and translator
  30. Charlotte Lennox : novelist, playwright, poet
  31. Elizabeth Griffith : dramatist, fiction writer, essayist
  32. Anne Steele / "Theodosia" : hymn writer and essayist; not openly named in the poem; centre of Scott's own literary circle and aunt of Mary Steele, to whom The Female Advocate is dedicated
  33. Frances Greville : poet
  34. Mary Whateley : poet and playwright
  35. Catharine Macaulay : historian
  36. Anna Williams : poet
  37. Sarah Pennington : author of conduct literature
  38. Elizabeth Montagu : patron of the arts, salonnière, literary critic, writer, Blue Stocking
  39. Dorothea Celesia : poet, playwright, translator
  40. Catherine Talbot : essayist and Blue Stocking
  41. Rose Roberts : not openly named in the poem
  42. Jael Pye : author of four works; not openly named in the poem
  43. Anna Laetitia Barbauld : poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, author of children's literature
  44. John Duncombe (writer) : author of The Feminead
  45. Thomas Seward : author of The Female Right to Literature, in a Letter to a Young Lady from Florence
  46. Anna Seward / "Athenia" : poet; mentioned by Scott as the beneficiary of Thomas Seward's progressive ideas about female education
  47. William Steele IV / "Philander" : Mary Steele's father

In the footnotes

  1. Katherine Grey
  2. Mary Sidney : poet
  3. Laetitia Pilkington : poet; included in Duncombe's ''The Feminead''

Electronic text

  • Full text at Scott, Mary. The Female Advocate; a poem occasioned by reading Mr. Duncombe's Feminead.