Ann Yearsley was born Ann Cromartie in Clifton Hill, Bristol, and she was also known as ‘Lactilla’ and ‘the Bristol Milkwoman’. Her mother, a milkwoman like Yearsley herself, encouraged her daughter’s education, ensuring that Yearsley learned to read and helping her to borrow books from travelling libraries so as to expand her daughter’s range of knowledge. In June 1774, she married John Yearsley who, despite being listed as a yeoman in an administrative document, lost his status as a yeoman and worked as a day labourer. Yearsley bore him seven children between 1775 and 1790, and the family fell into destitution in the winter of 1783–4. They refused parish charity and ended up living in a disused farm building where Yearsley’s mother died before charitable individuals offered alms to the struggling family. Yearsley was already writing poetry, and Hannah More’s cook showed Yearsley’s writing to her mistress, who then sought to help Yearsley publish her work.
Hannah More, a successful writer, was highly impressed by Yearsley’s poetry, and sought to help her to make an entrance into literary society. Her first volume, Poems on Several Occasions (1785), was published by subscription, and More’s vigorous efforts to secure subscribers through her connections made it an economic success. However, More’s emphasis on Yearsley’s impoverished background was suggestive of condescension towards her protégée, and when the profits came in, More refused to allow Yearsley to have control over her earnings, claiming to be concerned about how Yearsley’s husband might dispose of the capital of around £600. This caused a rift between More and Yearsley that was never mended. Yearsley broke completely from More in 1786 once More ended the trust and Yearsley gained access to the money.
Yearsley continued to write, publishing Poems, on Various Subjects in 1787, with the assistance of new patrons, in particular Frederick Augustus Hervey, Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, and she continued to enjoy the support of many prominent figures. ‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave‐trade’ (1788) typifies Yearsley’s strongly impassioned political poetry. She also began to write for the stage, and one of her plays, Earl Goodwin: an Historical Play (performed 1789 and printed 1791), was staged in her lifetime at Bristol and Bath. Her four‐volume historical novel, The Royal Captives: a Fragment of Secret History, Copied from an Old Manuscript (1795), reportedly received a £200 advance, and Kerri Andrews argues that the novel grew out of Yearsley’s connection with radical writers and literature.1 The Rural Lyre (1796) showed Yearsley continuing to write poetry despite her diverse literary interests. Containing poems on local matters, such as ‘Bristol Elegy’, and works that display her broader range, her final collection reveals the proto‐Romanticism noted by many critics. Publishing no further collections after The Rural Lyre, Yearsley focused on managing a circulating library at the Colonnade, Hotwells. Her husband died in 1803. As Moira Ferguson shows, ‘[t]hrough refusing class collusion and publicizing her altercation with Hannah More, Ann Yearsley fashioned a subversive multiple identity that was both liminal and culturally acceptable’.2 Yearsley’s oeuvre suggests the difficulty of pigeonholing her as a particular type of political or social poet; she eludes definition in such terms.
Stephen Van‐Hagen, ‘Ann Yearsley’, The Literary Encyclopedia, first published 3 March 2007 [http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4830, accessed 9 September 2015]; Mary Waldron, ‘Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30206, accessed 2 May 2015]; Ann Yearsley (bap. 1753, d. 1806): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/30206.