Constantia Grierson

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Constantia Grierson [née Crawley] (1705 – 2 December 1732), editor, poet, and classical scholar, was born in Kilkenny to an impoverished rural family. Self-educated, she received some training in languages, classical and modern, from her parish Minister. Her facility was such that as an adult she was, according to one editor, "a most excellent scholar, not only in Greek and Roman literature, but in history, divinity, philosophy, and mathematics: and what makes her character the more remarkable is, that she died so early as the age of 27, and that she acquired this great learning merely by the force of her own genius, and continual application."[1]

She moved to Dublin at the age of eighteen to study midwifery, but met publisher George Grierson (c.1679–1753) for whom she edited editions of Virgil, Terence, and Tacitus. After the death of George's first wife the couple were married, though the date is unrecorded and there is some indication that she was expecting a child. Constantia was actually the 2nd wife of George Grierson, & shortly after Constantia's death, he married yet again. Altogether she had four children, three of whom did not survive infancy.

CONSTANTIA (nee CRAWLEY) Grierson, Mrs., born c1705; died December 2nd, 1732, aged 27 years; buried December 4th, 1732; buried in St. John's Parish Church, Dublin, Ireland; married George Grierson, b. c1679, Dumfries-shire, Scotland; died October 27th, 1753, Drumcondra, Dublin, Ireland; buried St. John's Parish Church, Dublin, Ireland; Constantia married George, as his second wife about September, October 1726, Dublin, Ireland, if they married at all - sometime after the death of George Grierson's first wife, who died on or was certainly buried on date of April 19th, 1726, being buried at St. John's Parish Church, Dublin, Ireland - and it is not known whether or not there were any children from his first union with her who died in 1726.

Together, George Grierson & Constantia Crawley, his 2nd wife had issue known four [4], viz.:

  • George Primrose Grierson, b. May 29th, 1727; baptised June 17th, 1727, Dublin, Ireland, page (08).
  • George [Abraham] Grierson, baptism on October 1st, 1728, page (09); who was the longest liver, & died in Germany, leaving a Will,
  • A daughter, buried July 30th, 1731 (Greeves notes) page 304.
  • A daughter of Mrs. Grierson's, March 20th, 1732, burial, page (97).

She was active in her husband's business and he emphasized her contributions in his successful petition to the Irish House of Commons in 1729 to be granted the patent for King's Printer: "the Editions corrected by her have been approved of, not only in this Kingdom, but in Great Britain, Holland and elsewhere, and the Art of Printing, through her care and assistance, has been brought to greater perfection than has been hitherto in this Kingdom."[2] In addition to her editorial work she was a poet. Little of her poetry is extant, though her friend, Mary Barber, published six of her pieces in her Poems on Several Occasions (1734). Those six and two others, included by Laetitia Pilkington in her Memoirs, were published in Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland. Jonathan Swift included her, along with Barber and literary critic Elizabeth Sican, in his "triumfeminate" and she was part of his Dublin literary circle. After a period of frail health, Grierson died at the age of twenty-seven, possibly of tuberculosis, and was buried in Dublin. Her reputation was enhanced by being mentioned by George Ballard in his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, who have been Celebrated for their Writings or Still in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences (1752), though she did not receive much critical attention until recently.

[edit] References

  1. ^ G. Colman and B. Thornton. "Mrs. Constantia Grierson." Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland. London: Printed for T. Becket and Co. and T. Evans, at No. 50, Near York Buildings, Strand, 1773, 240.
  2. ^ D. Ben Rees. “Grierson , Constantia (1704/5–1732).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 6 Apr. 2007.

She was born in 1705, Kilkenny, Ireland; died 2 December, 1732; buried 4th December, 1732.

[edit] Works

  • Editions of Virgil, Terence (Dublin, 1727), and Tacitus (3 vols., Dublin, 1730).
  • Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland. Selected, with an Account of the Writers, by G. Colman and B. Thornton. London: Printed for T. Becket and Co. and T. Evans, at No. 50, Near York Buildings, Strand, 1773. (eight poems)

[edit] Resources