13 - Mary Astell and John Locke

Summary

A poor Northern English gentlewoman, Mary Astell was born in 1666 of a mother from an old Newcastle Catholic gentry family, and of a father who had barely completed his apprenticeship with the company of Hostman of Newcastle upon Tyne, before he died leaving the family debt-ridden when Mary was twelve. With customary spiritedness Mary Astell moved to London when she was twenty, making her literary debut by presenting to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, a collection of her girlhood poems, dedicated to him, accompanied by a request for financial assistance. Whether or not the Archbishop, who numbered among the prominent members of the clergy who had refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary, became Astell's patron in fact, we do not know. But Astell entered a circle of High Church prelates and intellectual and aristocratic women, including Lady Anne Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Lady Catherine Jones. To Lady Catherine Jones Astell dedicated the Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695) and her magnum opus, The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church (1705).