Career
She later explored subjects that included the nature of female friendship and the place of women writers. Born in Beoley, Worcestershire into the prosperous farming family of William Whateley (1694–1763), Mary Whateley was the youngest of nine children, of whom seven survived infancy. She had little formal education, but by 1759 she was having poems published in The Gentleman"s Magazine under the name Harriett Airey or Airy.
There her poetry came to the attention in 1761 of William Shenstone, who was highly impressed: "That she has generous and delicate sentiments, as well as ingenuity, may, I think, be fairly concluded from the whole tenor of her Poetry." Her first volume of Original Poems on Several Occasions was published by Robert Dodsley in 1764.
lieutenant contained 30 works, including odes and hymns and the satire "The Power of Destiny", which contemplated how different her existence would have been had she been born male. lieutenant went through several editions in London, Dublin and Walsall. of Prejudice" against that.
She presents herself also as a foe to negativism: "Nought I condemn but that Excess which clouds/The mental Faculties, to soothe the Sense:/Let Reason, Truth, and Virtue, guide thy Steps,/And ev"ry Blessing Heav"n bestows be thine." In 1766 Whateley married the widowed clergyman John Darwall, a father of five or six, by whom she had six further children. At least five of her poems appeared in miscellanies between 1770 and 1785.
Liberty: An Elegy, for example, appeared in that form in 1775 and again in 1783.
Her poem "Female Friendship", which appeared in The Westminster Magazine in April 1776, puts this in a context of self-sacrificing heterosexual friendship. Mary Darwall died in Walsall on 5 December 1825.
