Author: Saffery, Maria Grace
Biography:
SAFFERY, Maria Grace formerly ANDREWS (1772-1858: ancestry.co.uk)
The daughter of James Andrews and his wife Mary Harding, she was born at Greenham, near Newbury, Berkshire (the ODNB records speculation about her parentage and place of birth but Newbury is confirmed by the 1851 Census.) She was baptised on 30 Nov. 1772. The family moved to Isleworth (London) from where Maria went to Salisbury, living with her grandparents and attending the Brown Street Baptist church. On 20 Aug. 1799 in Bratton, Wiltshire, she married the Rev. John Saffery (1763-1825), a widower and Baptist minister; they had seven children. They were Reformed or “Particular” Baptists. She shared her husband’s religious and social commitments, including to the Baptist Missionary Society, and was involved in the anti-slavery movement. She taught at her own boarding school on Castle Street, Salisbury. John Saffery died in 1825, leaving his entire estate to his wife, the executrix of his will. She moved to Bratton, Wiltshire, to live with her daughter Jane (1805-84) who had married her cousin, Joshua Whitaker, a farmer. (Joshua was the son of Anne Andrews Whitaker, Maria’s sister). She died at Bratton on 5 Mar. 1858. Maria’s two early works—Chet Singh (dedicated to Charles James Fox) and a novel, The Noble Enthusiast (1792)—were written when she was in her teens. On her death she left an unpublished manuscript, “Lyra Domestica,” which was probably written in the 1830s. She also left extensive papers (including her unpublished manuscript) which are in the Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, and in the Bodleian Library. (ODNB 21 Sept. 2020; ancestry.co.uk 21 Sept. 2020, 7 Oct. 2025; Alison Twells, “‘We ought to obey God rather than man’: Women, Anti-Slavery, and Non-Conformist Religious Cultures,” in Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey, eds. Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865 [2011]; Salisbury and Winchester Journal 13 Mar. 1858) SR
Other Names:
- Maria Grace Andrews
- Mrs. John Saffery