Career
Contemporary evaluations stress her contribution to the evolving model of women in society, both by her publishing her work, and by the themes and opinions in that work. Mary Masters, thought to have been born in 1694 in Otley, West Yorkshire was — by her own insistence – a self-taught poet of humble birth: the preface to her first collection reads:
The Author of the following Poems never read a Treatise of Rhetorick, or an Art of Poetry, nor was ever taught her English Grammar. Despite this, she seems to have been known to many of the literati of the day, whose names are listed as subscribers to her two collections.
James Boswell records that Doctor Johnson, whom she occasionally visited, revised her volumes and "illuminated them here and there with a ray of his own genius".
That association on its own, and the entry on Boswell"s Life appear to have given Masters" name (if not her life and work) some historical currency. She is also associated with editor of the Gentleman"s Magazine, Edward Cave, and whose house was one of a number in which she resided when visiting London.
In her Familiar Letters and Poems upon several Occasions (London, 1755) there are three "Short Ejaculations", the first of which, the well-known "Tis religion that can give Sweetest pleasures while we live, has been adopted in many hymnals. The original consists of six lines only.
Two more were added in John Rippon"s Selection of Hymns (1787), and the eight lines divided into two stanzas, in which form the hymn is now known.
An ejaculation for use At the Altar, and beginning, "my ador"d Redeemer! deign to be", is sometimes met with. She is spoken of, in the Monthly Review, as "chaste, moral, and religious", and "an agreeable and ingenious writer". She is noted as a letter-writer, and in her epistles expresses proto-feminist views.
She is supposed to have died about 1759.
