Mary Latter was baptized on January 12, 1722, on Fleet Street, located in what is now Central London. Her father was a country attorney, and her mother was a milliner. Though she was baptized in Fleet Street, it is known to many that moving with her mother to Reading, Berkshire at an early age influenced her writings. Her family being low income made it not possible for her to pursue higher education. She used her talents in authorship and other professions to persistently try to overcome and be financially successful. 

As an author, she was labeled a poet, dramatist, and essayist. While being an author, she took on many professions, being a milliner like her mother, a lodger, and a bookseller. In her early attempts in writing, she wrote verses that were descriptive of the persons and characters of several ladies in Reading, which she thought was proper to disown in a rhymed advertisement inserted in the Reading Mercury, 17 November 1740 (Sage, 1999). Her most successful work was her first published work, The Miscellaneous Works, in Prose and Verse, of Mrs Mary Latter, in 1759. In 1771, at 49 years of age at Reading and London, she published Pro & Con; or, The Opinionists: An Ancient Fragment. Published for the Amusement of the Curious in Antiquity. She wrote and published in many genres and categories: tragedy, translation and adaptation (now lost), satirical dialogue, essays and letters (both personal, critical, and political), and spoofs of all kinds, often burlesquing the very style she is writing (satiric epistolary novels, pastoral dialogues, moralizing soliloquies and playful) (Cambridge.org). 

She died on March 28, 1777, at the age of 55, and was laid to rest in the churchyard of St.Lawerence, Reading (Seccombe, 1892). Though she suffered economic hardship all her life, she was known for her perseverance as a writer. She would also be remembered for her promise to stay unwavering in the face of her male critics and to never let being a woman with a common education stop her from writing.