Mary Wilkinson Priestley

BRP 's great-grandfather, her mother's grandfather, was the famous Radical and Unitarian scientist Joseph Priestley , sometimes referred to as the father of modern chemistry.He and his wife, Mary Wilkinson Priestley

Her close friends at this period included Mary and Joseph Priestley and a number of young women of her own age. She was particularly attracted by a pair of sisters who got themselves barred from...

ALB 's niece wrote of her (with an echo of Pope on himself) that while yet a child, she was surprised to find herself a poet. She herself, however, said it was Joseph Priestley

Most of ALB 's manuscripts perished in the bombing of London in September 1940. This followed on earlier calamities: the destruction of her juvenile poems (in an album kept by Mary Priestley ) in the...

Anna Aikin (later ALB ) wrote On Mrs P— 's Leaving Warrington, one of her earliest important surviving poems, which she threw into the carriage that was to carry the Priestleys away to Joseph