ABSTRACT
Most of what we know about Mary Collier comes down to us from her own pen. Collier states that she 'was Born near Midhurst in Sussex of poor, but honest Parents'. Probably about 1727, just after her father died, Collier ventured to Petersneld, a larger market town in Hampshire, where she worked as a charwoman. Sometime after Duck's pirated poems were published, Collier memorized them but, upset with Duck's representation of female agricultural labourers in his Thresher's Labour', she composed her gender-specific response, The Woman's Labour, which was not published until 1739. The Woman's Labour went to three editions by 1740, but Collier does not appear to have harboured aspirations for a career change, though she continued to write poems over the next two decades. Poems, on Several Occasions includes slightly revised versions of the two poems Collier first published in 1739, as well as nine new ones.
