Introduction

Summary

Mary Astell's life

Born on 12 November, 1666 to Peter Astell, a member of the Company of Hostmen at Newcastle upon Tyne, and his wife the former Mary Errington, Mary Astell is an unlikely candidate for the role of England's first feminist (Hill, 1986). Her father, although described as a gentleman, began as an apprentice to the Company of Hostmen, which enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the cartage of coal and grindstones. He did not complete his apprenticeship until Mary was eight years old and died when she was twelve, leaving the family debt-ridden. In the 1660s and 1670s 83 per cent of North Country women, and in the 1680s and 1690s 72 per cent, were illiterate; as calculated from signatures to court records, unable even to write their names (Cressy, 1977, 1980). Mary Astell, lacking formal education, found a family mentor in Ralph Astell, curate of St Nicholas church, Newcastle, author of ‘New-castle's heartie Congratulations’ to the King, the poem Vota Non Bella (1666), which had established his Royalist credentials. According to George Ballard, the eighteenth-century source on contemporary learned women, Astell mastered French, gained some knowledge of Latin and ‘under his [Ralph's] tuition made considerable progress in philosophy, mathematics and logic’ (Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, p. 382).