Mary scott, sarah froud, and the steele literary circle: A revealing annotation to the female advocate

In this essay, Timothy Whelan links Mary Scott, author of the early feminist poem The Female Advocate (1774), to a circle of West Country women writers led by the poet Mary Steele. A copy of The Female Advocate in the Huntington Library once belonged to a member of the Steele circle, Sarah Froud, whose identity has remained hidden and whose annotations have been largely misinterpreted. An examination of the correspondence of Steele and Scott presents a detailed picture of how these women viewed love and marriage in the 1770s and the difficult legacy such views posed for them by the 1790s.