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Myers Literary Guide:
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The North-East
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LADY MARY CAREY (c1610 - 1680) Born Mary Jackson, the daughter of John Jackson of Berwick, she lived a life of fashion, cards and dancing until stricken with religious doubts at the age of 18, a year which ended with her being assured of salvation. She first married Sir Pelham Carey, and after his death became the wife of George Payler, a parliamentary paymaster. In 1653 she began to collect her meditations. According to the Feminist Companion to Literature in English, the manuscript is in private hands. Long prose treatises are mixed with poems on the death of babies. By 1657 Mary had borne and lost five, who were all 'sickly, weak, pained' ; two more were still healthy and hopeful. Mary strives to accept God's will as 'more dear to me than any Childe.' An aborted birth makes her ask God's reasons. She concludes that dead babies are his just return for her 'dead' service. She favours the dialogue form, in exchanges between her husband and herself, God and Satan, or between soul and body.
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