To help keep Eliza, Fanny Blood, Fanny's sister, and herself - she founded a small school in the progressive Dissenting community of Newington Green. shameful incendiary in this shocking affair of a woman's leaving her bed-fellow.' When Mary encountered the inevitable criticism for this behaviour, she gave a robust reply: 'I knew I should be the. She responded by encouraging Eliza to leave her unhappy marriage and her new baby. Then, in 1784, Mary faced the depression of her newly married sister Eliza. Her mother became ill, and Mary returned to London in 1780-81 to nurse her through her fatal illness. Her work was interrupted by a series of family disasters. Unhappy with her situation, Mary was sustained by a dream of life alone with her beloved friend Fanny Blood, and by a strenuous piety that allowed her to believe in a blissful afterlife, to compensate for her present misery. In 1787, aged 19, she left home to work as lady's companion to a Mrs Dawson, in Bath. Her early years were spent, with her family, in following her feckless and violent father across England and Wales - he had given up the weaving for which he had been trained, and was making hopeless attempts to be a gentleman farmer. Her childhood was marked by her parents' downward social spiral and by her envy of her eldest brother, who was singled out by their mother's favour and by a wealthy grandfather's will. Mary was the second child, and eldest girl, in a family of seven.
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