Author: Williams, Ann
Biography:
WILLIAMS, Ann (d 1779: findmypast.com)
Ann Williams has only recently attracted attention as a proto-feminist—a working woman and amateur naturalist in provincial England at the end of the eighteenth century. Her quite substantial collection of poems, published at her own expense, not by subscription, consists of short poems on various occasions but mainly of “impromptus” and lines “on reading” this or that. The first poem is an imitation of one of Virgil’s Georgics; the last is about “Mrs. Rowe’s Poems.” Many are smart responses to remarks by “gentlemen,” for instance to one “who told me I was censured for being gay.” They reveal a good deal about her wit and a very little about her life. Her father and brother died in a house that she had since left. Her “second father” and patron John Calcraft (1726-72) is mourned in an elegy. She exchanged gifts of flowers with some of her circle of friends, and poems with “Miss Ounsham” (a name unknown to genealogical resources) who called her “Nancy.” Two proposed epitaphs for infants are most probably generic, not laments for any child of her own. The dedication of the book to the joint postmasters-general identifies her as the Postmistress of Gravesend in Kent. She was buried at Saints Peter and Paul, Milton next Gravesend, on 14 Jan. 1779. Pocock notes that “Miss Williams” kept the post office “for many years”; won a prize from the Society of Arts for her experiments with silkworms; and died when her clothes accidentally caught fire during an experimental “chymical Process.” Williams’s correspondence with the Society of Arts (now RSA), which began in 1775 and led to the award of twenty guineas in 1778, has recently come to light thanks to the RSA historian Anton Howes (findmypast.com 12 June 2024; “Ann Williams,” carpelibrumbooks.com; Robert Pocock, The History of the Incorporated Town . . . of Gravesend and Milton . . . [1797], 16; Leonie Hannan, “The Postmistress and the Silkworm,” socialhistoy.org.uk [2019]; Michelle Levy, “Ann Williams,” womensprinthistoryproject.com [2022]) HJ
Other Names:
- A. Williams