ABSTRACT
Mary Maria Colling, the daughter of a farm labourer, was born in Tavistock, Devon, and worked as a domestic servant for most of her life. Colling’s sewing skills were meagre, but she possessed an impressive spelling ability and a memory so retentive that she was able to ‘mind’ her poems, only writing them down when she was alone. In 1831, Colling’s sole volume, Fables and Other Pieces in Verse, was published by subscription under the patronage of novelist Anna Eliza Bray, wife of the vicar of Tavistock. Colling was disaffected with her ‘elevated’ condition as a published poet, and with far greater cause. She became the target of such intense resentment from local people that she would lie ‘crying in her bed’ at the thought of their attacks, and once ‘whilst so ill’ had ‘made up her mind to die’ (Fables, p. 43).
