Mary Bailey's feminist concerns about women's intellectual equality access political themes through classical models. Bailey was born Mary Elizabeth Walker in Gestingthorpe, Essex, in 1792, and married Reverend William Bailey in 1832 when she was 40 and he 25. A prolific poet, Bailey produced three volumes in England (The Months, Palmyra (1833) and Musae Sacrae (1835)) as well as the prose work Reflections Upon the Litany of the Church of England (1833). She also contributed to the London reviews and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1817–1980). In 1844, she and her son followed her husband to what was then called Van Diemen's Land and later renamed Tasmania by settlers, known as lutruwita in palawa kani, after he was transported for life following a conviction for forgery of a promissory note in favour of his sister. Her volumes are listed in J. R. de J. Jackson's Romantic Poetry by Women: A Bibliography 1770–1835, although there are no comprehensive studies in either Britain or Australia of Bailey's poetry.

Having been educated in England by her grandfather the Reverend William Jones, an eminent scholar, Bailey also produced translations from Greek, Latin, Italian and French poetry. These appeared in the Tasmanian newspaper, the Colonial Times (1828–57), and included her series of translations of the Greek ‘Odes of Anacreon’ (1849), as well as translations of Italian poets Taso and Metastasio. Although Bailey's work is particularly associated with the Colonial Times, her poetry also appeared in the Hobart Town Courier (1827–39), later known as the Courier (1839–1859), the Geelong Advertiser and Squatters’ Advocate (1845–47) and the Hobarton Guardian (1847–54), of which her husband became editor in 1847. Her later poetry appears in the Sydney Freeman's Journal (1850–1932). Bailey's writing exemplifies both Romantic Hellenism, which is concerned with ancient Greece, and the legacy of bluestocking women. These traditions are part of a nineteenth-century feminist approach that prioritized Western understandings of egalitarian principles, pacifism and education with the assumption that these ideas were universally applicable. Acknowledgement of the presence or claims of Indigenous people, however, is absent from Bailey's poetry, as it is from later poets including Caroline Leakey and Emily Manning.