Author: Yearsley, Ann
Biography:
YEARSLEY, Ann, formerly Cromartie (1753-1806: ODNB)
Yearsley was baptized at Clifton on 15 July 1753, the daughter of John Cromartie and Ann (d 1784), his wife. Her mother taught her to read, her brother, William (b 1751), to write. Among her mother’s small library, Young’s Night Thoughts was her favorite book. Her primary occupation, milkwoman, was at the time a highly regarded profession (Andrews). At Clifton on 9 June 1774, she married yeoman John Yearsley (d 1803), with whom she had seven children. Following the death of their first child, Henry (d 1776), she appears to have abandoned the church. In 1776, debts forced the Yearsleys to sell the Clifton property John had inherited from his mother. By 1784 she and her family were in deep distress, living in a barn, and nearing starvation. Richard Vaughan of St Michael’s Hill and the poet and philanthropist Hannah More and her sisters came to their rescue. More drew the world’s attention to Yearsley’s poetry by arranging the publication, by subscription, of Poems, on Several Occasions by Ann Yearsley, a Milkwoman of Bristol (1785). In her preface to Poems, More describes Yearsley as “a poor illiterate woman” whose writing, though worthy, is marred by “false concords, and inaccuracies.” This was irksome. She was not illiterate and, to her mind, not poor; she was a member of the yeomanry class fallen on hard times. Also irksome was More’s imposition of a trust that restricted access to the money raised by the subscription. During More and Yearsley’s final conversation, in July 1787, More called her “a savage” and “a bad woman.” She answered these insults in a “Narrative” appended to Poems, on Various Subjects (1787). Yearsley published a play, Earl Godwin (1789), that when it was performed in Bristol and Bath garnered her £80. For her 1795 novel, The Royal Captives, her publishers, G. G. and J. Robinson, paid her a £200 advance. Yearsley died in Melksham, Wiltshire, age 55, on 6 May 1806. She was buried on 12 May in St Andrew’s churchyard, Clifton. (ODNB 12 Sept. 2023; M. Waldron, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton [1996]; K. Andrews, Ann Yearsley and Hannah More [2013]) JC