Mary Maria Colling

Mary Maria Colling was born in Tavistock on 20 August 1804, daughter of Edmund Colling, a husbandman, and Anne, nee Domville. She was educated locally from the age of ten at a dame-school, where she learned to read and write and do needlework, and went into service as a lady's maid at fourteen.

Around 1825, a sermon preached by the Reverend Edward Atkyns Bray on the power of God as shown in the creation of the world inspired one of her poems. In 1831 her employer's wife, the author Anna Eliza Bray, discovered her writing and helped bring it to publication, sharing Colling's work with the poet laureate Robert Southey. Colling's only book, Fables and Other Pieces in Verse, mixed moral teaching with descriptions of rural life. Bray considered her a friend, though later editions of her own letters removed a passage on the friendship, citing the difference in their social class.

Colling suffered ill health in later life, including a period spent in an asylum, and returned to live with her parents in Tavistock. She died there of dropsy on 6 August 1853, aged 48.

Sources: Wikipedia. Further reading: Paul's Journal article "Will the real Mary Maria Colling please stand up?".

Portrait: Thomas Anthony Dean, 1831 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).

Portrait: Thomas Anthony Dean, 1831 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).