Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (* 1861 in London ; † 1907 ) was an English poet.

Life

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, the great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge , was born in London in 1861. Throughout her life, she stayed in the house of her art-savvy parents, who included Alfred Lord Tennyson , Robert Browning and John Ruskin among their guests. Mary was tutored by the scholar and poet William Johnson Cory, in part with other young girls. Apart from a few trips with her parents to Germany and later trips to Italy, Mary led a rather withdrawn and modest life. The regular visits from friends who were related to her resulted in an educated group in which the young women could let their enthusiasm for literature run free. Mary began teaching English literature to girls from working-class families in the 1990s. Later, in 1895, she became a teacher at Working Women's College.

It was the poet Robert Bridges who one day came across a manuscript of a poem by Mary and offered her his help with the publication. Her first book of poems, Fancy's Following , appeared in 1896 under the pseudonym "Anodos", and a second, Fancy's Guerdoni , followed in 1897. Most of her poems were only published after her death, because Mary had probably only intended her verses for private circles. During her lifetime, Mary Coleridge's literary activity was characterized by her five novels, a few short stories and essays. In 1907, during one of the annual trips to Harrogate, Mary developed acute appendicitis; she died at the age of 46 as a result of the surgery.

Mary Coleridge can probably not be attributed to the early, active women's movement, but her poems create a feminine counter-world with homoerotic allusions in which secret knowledge and (female) sexual power exist.

Works

• Poems (London, 1908).
• Collected Poems Ed. Theresa Whistler, (London, 1954).

literature

• Sandra M. Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven and London, 1979).