A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Bury, Elizabeth
BURY, ELIZABETH,
Daughter of Captain Lawrence, was born at Linton, Cambridgeshire, and married Mr. Lloyd, of Huntingdonshire; and after his death, Samuel Bury, a dissenting minister of Bristol. She excelled in her knowledge of divinity, mathematics, and the learned languages, and was noted for her piety. She particularly applied herself to the study of Hebrew, in which, by unwearied application and practice, she became a proficient She wrote critical remarks upon the idioms and peculiarities of the Hebrew language, which were found among her papers after her decease. She was a good musician, and spoke French with ease and fluency. She took great interest in the study of anatomy and medicine, which she frequently made useful among those by whom she was surrounded.
Her beneficence and generosity were habitual and persevering, and often exerted on an extensive scale, so that at one time she seriously impaired her fortune. She died at Bristol, in 1720, aged seventy-six.
Mrs. Bury often regretted the disadvantages of her sex, who, by their habits of education, and the customs of society, were illiberally excluded from the means of acquiring knowledge. She contended that mind was of no sex, and that man was no less an enemy to himself than to woman, in confining her attention to frivolous attainments. She often spoke with pleasure and gratitude of her own obligations to her father and her preceptors, for having risen superior to these unworthy prejudices, and opened to her the sources of intellectual enjoyment.