(A second play remained unfinished.) Neither venture was immediately successful. Leapor died of measles at Brackley on 12 November 1746 at the age of 24. The Bishop's Transcripts of the Parish Records show that she was buried "in woollen" two days later in Brackley. It is not known whether she was buried at the parish church of St Peter with St James, or at the now-demolished St James's Church, which stood in Goose Green close to where Mary is believed to have lived. Some of the proceeds from the publication of Volume One of her "Poems Upon Several Occasions" were used to pay for a headstone, but this has now been lost. According to Mary's contemporary, Henry Purefoy the headstone read, "In Memory of Mary Leapor daughter of Phillip and Ann Leapor: who departed this life Nov. ye 26. 1746 Aged 24". The date of death given on the headstone is believed to be incorrect, as the Bishop's Transcript is the definitive record of the date of her burial. Bridget Freemantle continued her quest to publish Leapor's work. In 1748 she arranged for the posthumous publication of "Poems upon Several Occasions" with some 600 subscribers, for the benefit of Philip Leapor. A second volume of poetry and drama was published three years later by Samuel Richardson and edited by Isaac Hawkins Browne. Mary Delany, Stephen Duck, Elizabeth Montagu, and Sarah Scott were among the subscribers. These volumes secured Leapor's reputation as "one of the most interesting of the natural poets." John Duncombe praised her in "The Feminead" (1754), and Bonnell Thornton and George Colman included her in their "Poems by Eminent Ladies" (1755). Leapor herself seems not to have welcomed her status as a "natural" poet "untainted" by artifice. She worked hard to acquire a literary education as best she could and embraced the neoclassical ideals of her period. At the time of her death she had accumulated 17 volumes and several volumes of plays: a considerable library for someone with a limited income. There are many grammatical errors in Leapor's work, for which Freemantle apologises in the Preface to the "Poems Upon Several Occasions", assuring readers that had Leapor lived to edit them, the poems would have been flawless. She adds that they are, nevertheless, entertaining. After the "centuries of neglect" recognised by Prof. John Clarke ("Yesterday's Brackley", Barracuda Books, 1990) in a chapter about Mary, a window, inspired by her work and based on a design by a local resident Carolyn Hunter, was created by stained-glass artist Rachael Aldridge and installed on the first floor of the newly refurbished Town Hall in Brackley in 2018.