Maria Grace Saffery

Maria Grace Saffery (née Andrews) (1773–1858) was a Baptist poet and hymn-writer.

Early life

There is still a church in Brown Street in Salisbury although this building is more recent

Maria Grace Saffery was born 1773 and died 5 March 1858 in Westbury district Wiltshire, England. Saffery was possibly the daughter of William Andrews of Stroud Green, Newbury, Berkshire although other sources differ.^[1] She was baptized on 30 November 1774.^[2] At the age of fifteen, she started writing her first big piece and showed great abilities in doing so. Her first poem was about Chait Singh, the Raja of Benares who was in dispute with Warren Hastings in India.^[1] Saffery was originally brought under the personal influence of Thomas Scott, the bible commentator.

Personal and family life

Maria Saffery had a sister named Anne, who was also a writer. Maria married John Saffery pastor of the Baptist church at Brown Street in Salisbury, becoming his second wife, in 1799. They had six children, the eldest, Philip John Saffery, succeeded to the office of paster of the church at his father's death in 1825.^[3] Saffery also created a girl's school in Salisbury. The next year she retired to Bratton in Wiltshire, where the rest of her life was spent with her daughter and later died and was buried in the graveyard of the baptist chapel at the school.

Major works

Poems

• Cheyt Sing. A Poem. By a Young Lady of Fifteen (1790)^[4]

Hymns

• Tis the Great Father we adore (1828)
• Poems on Sacred Subjects (1834)
• God of the sunlight hours, how sad (1834)
• There is a little lonely fold (1834)
• Fain, O my child, I'd have thee know (1844)^[5]

Novels

• The Noble Enthusiast (1792)^[6]

See also

English women hymnwriters (18th to 19th-century)

• Eliza Sibbald Alderson
• Augusta Amherst Austen
• Sarah Bache
• Charlotte Alington Barnard
• Sarah Doudney
• Charlotte Elliott
• Ada R. Habershon
• Katherine Hankey
• Frances Ridley Havergal
• Anne Steele
• Emily Taylor
• Emily H. Woodmansee

Notes

1. Rosemary Mitchell, ‘Saffery, Maria Grace (bap. 1772?, d. 1858)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 13 Nov 2014
2. Mitchell, Rosemary. "Saffery, Maria Grace (bap. 1772?, d. 1858), Hymn Writer and Poet". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
3. Lowther, William Boswell (1897). "Saffery, Maria Grace (DNB00)". Wikisource. Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900. p. 114.
4. Whelan, Timothy. "Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840. Part 2".
5. "Maria Grace Saffery". Hymnary.org.
6. Whelan, Timothy (Winter 2012). "West Country Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840". Wordsworth Circle 43.

Further reading

• Mary Grace Saffery, Anne Andrews Whitaker, Timothy Whelan (2011). Correspondence of Maria Grace Saffery and Anne Andrews Whitaker. London: Pickering & Chatto. OCLC 755972239.