Author: Hiles, Mary
Biography:
HILES, Mary, later STEPHENS (1801-66: ancestry.co.uk)
She was born on 9 Sept. 1801 and baptised on 20 Nov. at Oldham Street Presbyterian, Liverpool, the eldest daughter of Joseph Hiles, carpet manufacturer, and his wife Dorothy Lee, who had married in 1799. Her father traded first in Liverpool, then moved to Kidderminster, Worcestershire, and died at Broadway in 1850. Her mother had died earlier in 1826. She dedicated her only known publication, The Deluge (1828) to her father, “my beloved and only parent,” and in the 1841 Census is recorded living with him and her younger sisters Emma and Clarinda. (Her sister Martha, who is probably the subject of the poem “To My Sister, M--,” had married in 1832.) Other poems help to identify her (“On Visiting the School for the Blind, Liverpool”) and indicate that she was a teacher (“To My Pupils”). She married the Baptist minister John Goddard Stephens (1799-1879) of Bilsworth, Northants, at the Baptist Chapel, Kidderminster, on 15 Jan. 1845. They lived for many years at Gayton, Northants, where she was recorded as governess of a school in the 1851 Census. They later moved to Wem in Shropshire, where she died on 10 Apr. 1866, aged 64. (ancestry.co.uk 24 Dec. 2021; Worcester Herald 25 Jan. 1845; Worcester Chronicle 30 Jan. 1850; Northampton Mercury 14 Apr. 1866; GRO) AA