Mary Leadbeater

Leadbeater, Mary (1758-1826), poet, and diarist. Born in Ballitore, Co. Kildare, granddaughter of the founder of a Quaker school. She published improving collections of anecdotes and ‘biographies’, among them, Cottage Dialogues (1811). Her Collection of Lives of the Irish Peasantry (1822) is compassionate. Her literary monument is, however, the journals she kept from 1766 to the end of her life, later edited by her niece Elizabeth as The Leadbeater Papers (2 vols., 1862) and subtitled Annals of Ballitore.