Frances Maria Cowper

• Name — Maria Frances Cecilia Cowper • Pen Name — "a lady" • Birth Name — Frances Maria Cecilia Madan • Born — 22 November 1726 • Birthplace — Hertingfordbury Park, Hertfordshire, England • Died — 15 October 1797 • Place of death — Devonshire Street, Paddington, Central London • Resting Place — South Audley Anglican Chapel, Grosvenor Square, Mount Street, Westminster • Occupation — Writer • Subject — Devotional • Spouse — William Cowper (1721—1769) • Children — Frances Cecilia Cowper; Charles Cowper; George Cowper; Spencer Cowper • Relatives — Judith Madan (mother); Martin Madan(father); Martin Madan (brother); Spencer Madan (brother); Penelope Maitland (sister); Frederick Madan (brother); James Russel Madan (brother)

Frances Maria Madan was the second of nine children of Judith Madan [née Cowper] (1702–1781) and Colonel Martin Madan (1700–1756). She had weak eyesight as a child and was sent to a Mrs. King, an oculist, from whom she learnt to read and write. She also attended a school in Wells, Somerset and both her parents encouraged her literary interests. She and her sister Penelope were considered "beauties" in London society. Their relationship was studied as a revelatory example of the dynamics of friendship within the family cell in Georgian Britain. Her father travelled, the family's finances were strained, and her mother, whose literary career had ended with her marriage, suffered from recurrent depression. In 1749 or thereabouts, her mother joined the Methodist circle of John Wesley (1703–1791) and Selina Hastings (1707–1791). Cowper and her cousin, author and hymn-writer William Cowper, were coreligionists and from 1766 carried on a written correspondence "almost entirely of a religious character." On 5 Aug. 1749, she married another first cousin, also named William Cowper (1721–1769), of Hertingfordbury. The couple had six children: • William Cowper (1750–1798) • Maria Judith Cowper (born 1752) • George Cowper (1754–1787) • Frances Cecilia Cowper (1764–1849) • Charles Cowper (born 1765) • Spencer Cowper (died young) Cowper's husband died after two decades of marriage and she lived a widow for another twenty-eight years, first in York and then, after 1772, in London.

Cowper published one volume of religious verse, edited by her famous relative William Cowper. First published in 1792, there was a second edition in 1807 and a third in 1810, both posthumous, as well as two U.S. editions. Initially published as by "a lady," a footnote in the third edition misidentifies the author as "Mrs. Cowper, the aunt of the immortal poet" when she was in fact his cousin. The preface is short and offers a standard modest disclaimer that the poems are published at the request of friends. The collection comprises eighty-nine poems on Christian themes. In the preface and some of the poems, Cowper discusses the advantages of retirement from the world. Her hymn "My span of life will soon be done" has been published in seventy-eight hymnals: My span of life will soon be done, The passing moments say; As length'ning shadows o'er the mead Proclaim the close of day (ll. 1–4) Two of her poems were anthologized in Roger Lonsdale's 1989 collection, Eighteenth-century women poets.

• Cowper, Frances Maria. Original poems, on various occasions. By a lady. Revised by William Cowper, Esq. of the Inner Temple. William Cowper, Editor. London: printed for J. Deighton, Holborn; J. Mathews, Strand; and R. Faulder, Bond Street, 1792.

• [Cowper, Frances Maria]. Original Poems, on Various Occasions. By a Lady. Revised by William Cowper, Esq. of the Inner Temple. Second Edition. London: For Mathews and Leigh, 18, Strand, R. Faulder, Bond Street, and J. Deighton, Cambridge. Orig. pub. 1792; 1807. (Full text at Google Books).