{{Use dmy dates|date=July 2017}} {{Use British English|date=July 2017}} '''Maria De Fleury''' (fl. 1773–1791) was a London-based Baptist poet, hymnist and polemicist descended from French Huguenots. Little is known of her private life. The dating of her birth at 1754 and her death at 1794 are conjectural.<ref>Orlando project [http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=deflma Retrieved 29 July 2016.] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170202004524/http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=deflma |date=2 February 2017 }}</ref><ref name="Romantic">{{Cite book |title=The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature: A–G. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CDuCchT6PE0C&pg=PA339 |year=2012 |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |isbn=978-1-4051-8810-4 |pages=339–340}}</ref>
==Life and work== De Fleury is thought to have been a schoolteacher before moving to 2 City Mews, White Cross Street, Islington, and then to nearby 31 Jewin Street, Cripplegate, in the City of London. However, there are signs in her writings that she felt defensive about her lack of formal education. Her earliest dated poem is an Epithalamium, written to mark her brother's wedding on 25 November 1773.<ref name="Blackwell" >Wayne C. Ripley in ''The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature'', ed. Frederick Burwick (London: Blackwell Reference, 2012). [http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405188104_chunk_g97814051881047_ss1-4 Retrieved 29 July 2016.]</ref><ref name="ODNB" >Emma Major, "Fleury, Maria de (fl. 1773–1791)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (Oxford, UK: OUP, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/45844 Retrieved 29 July 2016.]</ref>
As a member of the strongly anti-Catholic Protestant Association, De Fleury actively defended Lord George Gordon, who had instigated it and was accused by Charles Wesley and others of inciting the riots over the restoration of civil rights to Catholics. Her pamphlet vindicating Gordon, entitled ''Unrighteous Abuse Detected and Chastised'', appeared in 1781, as did her ''Poems, Occasioned by the Confinement and Acquittal of the Right Honourable Lord George Gordon, President of the Protestant Association''. The pamphlet "depicts her enemies baying against Truth like village curs at the moon."<ref name="Feminist">''The Feminist Companion to Literature in English'', eds Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 276.</ref>
Despite being a Baptist, Fleury belonged to the Independent Meeting House of John Towers, originally a breakaway from a Presbyterian congregation. The meeting house was moved from Bartholomew Close to new premises in Jewin Street in 1784. Fleury was also on close terms with the Baptist minister and religious writer John Ryland. She went on to dedicate to Gordon a masque-like work in blank verse entitled ''Henry, or the Trump of Grace'' (1782), in which Henry's guardian angels, Religion and Grace, stave off the attacks of Syren.<ref name="Blackwell"/><ref name="Feminist"/> This went into three editions.<ref name="ODNB" />
==God and liberty== Many of De Fleury's hymns – some still sung today<ref>Hymnary site [http://www.hymnary.org/person/DeFleury_Maria Retrieved 29 July 2016.]</ref> – appeared first in her volume ''Hymns for Believers' Baptism'' (1786). Her ''Divine Poems and Essays'' were collected and published in 1791.<ref name="Divine Poems and Essays on Various Subjects">{{Cite book |last1=De Fleury |first1=Maria |title=Divine Poems and Essays on Various Subjects |publisher=The Author |date=1791 |location=London |url=https://archive.org/details/divinepoemsessay00fleu |accessdate=29 July 2016 |language=en}}</ref> Included was a work in couplets entitled "British Liberty Established and Gallic Liberty Restored, or The Triumph of Freedom", where she compares herself to Deborah celebrating Jael and honours such figures and events in history as Alfred, Magna Carta, Oliver Cromwell, King George III and the French Revolution. It emphasizes the Amazonian role played by women in the course of history and presages Christ's reign on Earth.<ref name="Feminist"/>
De Fleury, encouraged by John Ryland,<ref name="ODNB" /> became involved again as a controversialist in a "pamphlet war" with the preacher William Huntington and his ostensible Antinomianism. Her ''Letter'' of November 1787 elicited from him abuse from the pulpit, and from his daughter a 1788 pamphlet entitled ''Mother Abbess'' denying the place of women in the area of public debate.<ref name="A Letter to the Rev. Mr Huntington">{{Cite book |last1=De Fleury |first1=Maria |title=A Letter to the Rev. Mr Huntington [in reply to his "The Modern Plasterer detected"] |date=1787 |publisher=T. Wilkins |location=London |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Jx1gAAAAcAAJ |language=en}}</ref> Her ''Answer'' (1788) stressed that women's liberty of speech was God-given. Her ''Antinomianism Unmasked and Refuted'' (1791) again drew a printed retort from Huntington (''The Broken Cistern'') and another series of responses, De Fleury's ''Falsehood Examined on the Bar of Truth'' and Huntingdon's ''An Answer to Fools''.<ref name="Feminist"/><ref name="Falsehood Examined">{{Cite book |last1=Fleury |first1=Maria De |title=Falsehood Examined at the Bar of Truth; Or, a Farewell to Mr. Wm. Huntington, and Mr. Thomas Jones, of Reading: Containing Strictures on the Broken Cistern; Written by the Former, Addressed to the Rev. Mr. Ryland, Senior. And Upon Mystery Babylon, Encompassed for Utter Destruction, Written by the Latter. By Maria De Fleury |date=1791 |location=London |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xN5bAAAAQAAJ |language=en}}</ref><ref name="The broken cistern">{{Cite book |last1=Huntington |first1=William |title=The broken cistern, and the springing well: or, The difference between head notions, and heart religion |year=1800 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FvsCAAAAQAAJ |language=en}}</ref>
After 1791 De Fleury disappears from history, although ''The Missionary Magazine'' published an otherwise unattested poem credited to her in 1802.<ref name="Romantic" />
==References== {{Reflist|30em}}
{{Authority control}} {{DEFAULTSORT:De Fleury, Maria}} Category:English hymnwriters Category:18th-century English poets Category:18th-century English women writers Category:Baptist writers Category:British women hymnwriters Category:English Baptists Category:English pamphleteers Category:English people of French descent Category:Musicians from the City of London Category:Musicians from the London Borough of Islington Category:Writers from the City of London Category:Writers from the London Borough of Islington