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Concept
Ann Yearsley
Summary
Ann Yearsley, née Cromartie (8 July 1753 – 6 May 1806), also known as Lactilla, was an English poet and writer from the labouring class, in Bristol. The poet Robert Southey wrote a biography of her.
Born in Bristol to John and Anne Cromartie, Ann worked in childhood as a milkwoman, like her mother. She received no formal education, but her brother taught her to write. She married John Yearsley, a yeoman, in 1774. A decade later the family was rescued from destitution by the charity of Hannah More and others.
Yearsley was among the noted Bristol women to campaign against the Bristol slave trade. In other respects her politics have been described as conservative.
Yearsley's husband died in 1803. She died in 1806 at Melksham near Trowbridge, Wiltshire. Her grave can be found in Birdcage Walk, Clifton, Bristol.
Hannah More called her first encounter with Yearsley positive, saying her writing "excited [her] attention" as it "breathed the genuine spirit of poetry, and [was] rendered still more interesting by a certain natural and strong expression of misery that seemed to fill the head and mind of the author." More organized subscriptions for Yearsley to publish Poems, on Several Occasions (1785), but its success led to a quarrel between them over access to the trust in which its profits were held. Yearsley included her account of the quarrel in an "autobiographical narrative" appended to a fourth, 1786 edition of the poems.
Now supported by Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, Yearsley published Poems, on Various Subjects in 1787. A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade appeared in 1788. The latter was seen by many critics to rival a similar poem by her ex-patron Hannah More, entitled "Slavery: A Poem".
Yearsley then turned to drama, with Earl Goodwin: an Historical Play (performed in 1789; printed in 1791) and to fiction, with The Royal Captives: a Fragment of Secret History, Copied from an Old Manuscript (1795). Her final poetry collection, The Rural Lyre, appeared in 1796.
Official source
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