Mary Collyer

Mary Collyer (née Mitchell) (c. 1716 – 1762) was an English translator and novelist.

Mary Collyer was part of the John "Bankes" pedigree which can be viewed at Geoff's Genealogy. She married Joseph Collyer the elder (1714/15–1776), a writer and bookseller; their son, Joseph Collyer the younger, was an engraver, and illustrated one edition of his mother's translation Death of Abel.

Works

• The Virtuous Orphan (1743), a translation of La vie de Marianne by Marivaux
• Memoirs of the Countess de Bressol … from the French (2 vols., 1743)
• Felicia to Charlotte: being letters from a young lady in the country, to her friend in town. Containing a series of most interesting Events, interspersed with Moral Reflections; chiefly tending to prove, that the Seeds of Virtue are implanted in the Mind of Every Reasonable Being. (1744–9, in 2 vols). Collyer's own novel
• The Christmas Box (1748–9)
• Death of Abel (1761), a translation of Solomon Gessner's Der Tod Abels (1758)
• The Messiah (2 vols., 1763), a translation of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's Der Messias. Completed and published by Collyyer's husband.

Further reading

• Katherine Sobba Green, The Courtship Novel, 1740-1820: A Feminized Genre. 1991.

External links

• Joyce Fullard, ‘Collyer , Mary (1716/17–1762)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 13 Nov 2006