Harriet Eleanor Baillie Hamilton King

Background

King was born in Edinburgh and was the daughter of Admiral W. A. Baillie Hamilton and Lady Harriet Hamilton, sister of the Duke of Abercorn.

Education

King was educated at home.

Career

According to Harriet's memoirs, she wrote poetry from an early age. By age eleven she also became entranced with Italy, a passion she derived from history books and the odd poem. This literary crush, so to speak, proved productive, since King wrote many of her most successful poems on the subject of Mazzini as the “master in her own mind.” Her first published poem, however, imagined “The Execution of Felice.” King’s final works, however, are recollections of the master of her own mind, Mazzini.

Achievements

• Harriet Eleanor Baillie Hamilton King is best remembered for her religious, emotional poetry in support of her Italian hero, Giuseppe Mazzini.

Works

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  • Aspromonte and Other Poems 1869
  • Ballads of the North: And Other Poems 1889
  • The Hours of the Passion: And Other Poems 1902
  • Ugo Bassi's Sermon in the Hospital 1885
  • The Disciples 1888
  • A Book of Dreams 1883
  • Letters and Recollections ofMazzini 1912

Religion

Kingwas a Catholic without knowing it. King’s reflections on God’s will, which culminated in Cardinal Manning persuading King to convert to Catholicism, were somewhat at odds with her worship of Mazzini. Mazzini himself was an excommunicate, but King insisted that since Mazzini had been baptized “the inborn Catholic survived.” Moreover, King felt a strange confluence between the will of her God and the will of Mazzini. When King asked Mazzini what he would have her write, he replied that ‘it is not my words that you must speak, but the word that God gives to you.’ This comment later became King’s defense when, after Mazzini’s death, The Disciples 1873 was attacked as being Christian when Mazzini clearly was not, even though he was widely known as a highly moral leader. Ironically, King’s devotion to the non-Christian hero led her from Protestantism to the Catholic Church.

Views

King's writing suggested a kind of spiritual anguish when one fails to live up to God’s expectations. King was perhaps writing about her own physical and spiritual suffering that seems to have been constant throughout her life. Her poems often concern the human struggle to discern the will of God.

Personality

As a life-long admirer of things Italian, King spent her life playing the role of disciple: to her parents, to her religious advisors, and to her poetic and political heroes. King often describes her writing in passive terms: she imagines herself inspired, dragged, filled, or otherwise forced to create. Moreover, her access to materials seems to have been controlled by her parents and husband throughout her life.

Within a few years, King began to correspond with the “master in her own mind,” Mazzini. The two exchanged thoughts and poetry, though their friendship was put on ice briefly when King’s parents forbade their unmarried daughter to engage in such correspondence. King obliged her parents, but resumed her correspondence once she had dutifully contracted to marry Henry King, a publisher and banker, in 1863. During her marriage, which lasted until Henry King’s death in 1878, she gave birth to seven children, and lived from 1865 as a martyr to some undiagnosed illness. Nevertheless, she persisted in her writing, which, she claimed, God had given her to do.

Despite the overly emotional and predictable nature of many of her poems, King’s verses remain noteworthy even today for their lyricism.

Quotes from others about the person

• “Although many will be put off by the religious poems that are overly emotional and predictable, readers today will like many of her lyrical poems.” - Linda A. Julian

Connections

In 1863, Harriet married Henry Samuel King, a publisher. He died in 1878. The couple had seven children.

Father:

William Alexander Baillie

Mother:

Lady Harriet Hamilton

husband:

Henry Samuel King

References

• Mid-Victorian Poetry, 1860-1879
  1999
• The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Woman Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present Describes the lives and work of female literary figures.
  1990
• Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies) This reader contains sixteen new and recent essays addressing work by, and issues raised concerning, Victorian women poets.
  1999