Mary Jones was the daughter of an Oxford craftsman and, later in life, postmistress of the city. She was also a poet and writer, whose first and only published collection, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1750), attracted support from an extraordinary 1,400 subscribers and received admiring reviews.

Jones is mainly read and studied today as a poet whose work imitates and responds to that of her more famous contemporaries Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Yet this is just one aspect of her writing. This talk will shine a light on some of the other roles that Jones adopted or was thrust into as a writer: prose satirist, object of male adulation, and writer of songs. In doing so, it will reflect on the status of female authors and the often-overlooked connections between poetry and music in the eighteenth century.