Mary Jones (4) (1707–1778)

Mary Jones was born and raised in Oxford, England, the daughter of a craftsman. She lived most of her adult life with her brother, Rev. Oliver Jones, a senior chaplain of Christ Church Cathedral. She learned French and Italian in childhood. By 1730, she had become a friend of the Hon. Martha Lovelace, an aristocrat and a maid-of-honor to Queen Caroline. Jones wrote poems in private letters to Lovelace and her well-connected circle of female friends and relations and occasionally stayed at their country houses. In 1742, she discovered that one of her works, The Lass of the Hill, had been published without her knowledge, around the same time as her epitaph to Lord Aubrey Beauclerk was printed by his widow without consulting Jones. Apparently she did not consider publishing her works herself until pushed to it by her friends. Influenced by Alexander Pope, she wrote formal poems on domestic and social themes with a wry humor. In 1750, her wealthy friends financed the publication of the only known volume of collected poetry, letters, and translations in her lifetime, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. The book was subsequently published to commercial success and received admiring reviews from critics. Some of her individual poems appeared in The London Magazine in 1752 and the anthology Poems by Eminent Ladies in 1755. Samuel Johnson, who met Jones on his visits to Oxford, called her "the Chantress." Jones served as the postmistress of Oxford later in life.