Author: Ware, Mary
Biography:
WARE, Mary formerly Blake (1745/46-1840: GM)
The overlooked poet Mary Ware was born in the cathedral city of Peterborough, the only girl of the three children of a captain of grenadiers Robert Blake (1720-1804) and his wife, Mary. Her father suffered eleven wounds in the 1745 battle of Prestonpans. Self-taught in Latin and Greek, she wrote in a preface to her Poems, “my education was that of most females.” On 7 Aug. 1781, when she was age 35, she married a widower, the elderly dean of Peterborough, Charles Tarrant (1723-1791). Following his death, she married her junior by twenty-three years, major Henry Ware (q.v.). Both marriages were childless. She was “a grateful friend” of her husband’s uncle, the poet Francis Noel Clarke Mundy (q.v). In 1803, she and her second husband settled at Ware Hill House in the parish of Great Amwell, Hertfordshire. She died there, age 94, on 8 June 1840. She is buried in a tomb with her husband in the churchyard of St John the Baptist. An inscription on the tomb reads: “Mary Ware, in whom peculiar powers of mind, highly cultivated, were united with a benevolence that endeared her to those around her, and a fear of God that gave her peace in death.” (GM 168 [1840], 215; V. B. Crowther-Benyon, “Notes on Some Family Relics of the Jacobite Revolution, 1745,” Archaeological Journal 75 [1918] 195-208) JC
Other Names:
- Mrs. Ware