Author: Steele, Mary
Biography:
STEELE, Mary, later DUNSCOMBE (1753-1813: Whelan)
Danebury: or The Power of Friendship, a Tale. With Two Odes “by a Young Lady” was published in Bristol in 1779. It is dedicated to the author’s father (who had arranged the printing). Appreciative reviews praised its “excellence” (MR) and its “delicacy of style and sentiment” (CR). Although no other volumes of verse appeared, the author continued to write, to circulate her poems in manuscript, and to contribute occasionally to periodicals. She was Mary Steele, born on 24 July 1753 at Broughton, Hampshire, daughter of William Steele (1715-85), a prominent merchant, and his first wife Mary Bullock (1713-62). Steele bought the manor of Broughton House in 1758. He was an active layman among the west-country Baptists and one of the founders of the Bristol Education Society in 1770. After the death of her mother, Mary looked for a role model especially to her aunt Anne Steele (q.v.), who lived with the family, and whom Mary nursed during her last illness. Danebury, set at an historic Hampshire site, may have been composed while she was at boarding-school in Hackney, London (1766-9). After returning to Broughton she occupied herself with the religious and philanthropic interests of her extended family and of a close circle of dissenting women friends, a network recently brought to light in an eight-volume edition of Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 (2011) by Timothy Whelan. (Danebury was first publicly revealed as hers in The Female Geniad by her friend Elizabeth Benger, q.v.) Steele did not marry until 1797: her husband was the Rev. Thomas Dunscombe (1748-1811). She outlived him and died at Broughton on 14 Nov. 1813. (findmypast.com 26 Nov. 2024; ancestry.com 26 Nov. 2024; Timothy Whelan, “Mary Steele, Mary Hays, and the Convergence of Women’s Literary Circles in the 1790s,” JECS 28:4 [2015], 511-24; MR 61 [July 1779], 43-4; CR 47 [May 1779], 390-1; Bath Journal 22 Nov. 1813) HJ