Louise Imogen Guiney was an American poet, essayist, biographer, editor, and short story writer.
She established herself as an author of lyrical, Old English-style poems written in the literary traditions of seventeenth-century. Her writings reflected her interest in the Catholic tradition in literature and often focused on goodness and heroic bravery.
She also wrote several biographies and multiple literary and historical studies.
Background
Ethnicity:
Louise Imogen Guiney’s father was of an Irish origin.
Louise Imogen Guiney was born on January 7, 1861, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. She was a daughter of Patrick Robert Guiney, a United States Army Brigadier-General at the Civil War, and Janet Margaret Guiney (maiden name Doyle).
Decorated for heroism in the war conflict, Patrick Robert Guiney suffered from injuries till the end of his life in 1877. According to some critics, her father’s great deeds influenced the presence of ideal of chivalric heroism in her poetry.
Education
Louise Imogen Guiney was raised in Christian traditions. She entered a convent school, the Elmhurst Academy in Providence, Rhode Island, at the age of eleven. While there, Guiney attended a liberal arts curriculum. She graduated in 1879.
Later, she obtained lessons from private tutors.
Career
Louise Imogen Guiney started her professional journey after graduating from the Elmhurst Academy in 1879. During the following twenty years, living in Boston and Auburndale, Massachusetts with her mother and aunt, she collected various jobs to support herself and her family, including the posts of a teacher at Smith College, a librarian at the Boston Public Library, and postmistress.
However, she didn’t drop her writing activity and contributed to different periodicals in the early 1880s, including Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly, and Wide Awake. Her debut poetry collection, entitled ‘Songs from the Start’, was published in 1884. The work received good reviews from critics, and Guiney’s first publisher, John Boyle O'Reilly who edited the Boston Pilot, helped to introduce the author to Boston literati elite, including such personalities as Francis Parkman, Brooks Adams, George Parsons Lathrop and James, Annie Fields, and others. Quickly, the young poet was accepted to many literary and social clubs.
A year after the publication of her poems, Guiney’s first volume of essays, ‘Goose-Quill Papers’, saw the print and obtained the same acclaim. At the end of the decade, Louise Imogen Guiney wrote essays and fairy tales. Her second collection of poems, ‘The White Sail, and Other Poems’, issued in 1887, demonstrated the development of her talent.
In a couple of years, Guiney, accompanied by her mother, traveled to England also visiting Ireland and France. During the trip, she enlarged the circle of her literary colleagues and took interest in the Catholic tradition in English literature. She earned money writing the English letters for the Boston Post.
On her return to the United States in 1891, Guiney had financial troubles that pushed her and her friend Alice Brown to edit ‘A Summer in England, A Hand-Book for the Use of American Women’ and other notable works. Although, it was this time, when she also worked on one of her most important collection of poems, ‘A Roadside Harp’, gathering her impressions from traveling and lands she contemplated meanwhile.
At the middle of the 1890s, Guiney had an opportunity to refresh her emotions having a trip to the country in the summer. That inspired her on the creation of prose, including essays on such writers as Henry Vaughan, George Farquhar and William Hazlitt, a fiction ‘Lovers' Saint Ruth's and Three Other Tales’, and ‘Patrins’.
In 1901, Louise Imogen Guiney relocated to Oxford, the United Kingdom where she devoted her time to editing, writing essays and critical reviews for periodicals. In her literary studies, she concentrated on English and Irish authors associated with the Catholic literary tradition, and on the Cavalier poets. She produced a biography of Robert Emmet and a history of the Elizabethan martyr Edmund Campion (Leggott). Guiney had problems to establish herself as a poet in England, caused in part by regular health problems that interfered her creative activity.
The last collection of Guiney’s poems that included her previous publications and unpublished works, was issued in 1909.
Quotations:
"Life is legal tender, and individual character stamps its value. We are from a thousand mints, and all genuine. Despite our infinitely diverse appraisements, we make change for one another. So many ideals planted are worth the great gold of Socrates; so many impious laws broken are worth John Brown."
"Life is a breathing-space between two eternities, a holiday with appalling realities behind and before."
"No pleasure or success in life quite meets the capacity of our hearts. We take in our good things with enthusiasm, and think ourselves happy and satisfied; but afterward, when the froth and foam have subsided, we discover that the goblet is not more than half-filled with the golden liquid that was poured into it."
"My own passion, all my life, has been non-collecting."
"Children are born optimists and we slowly educate them out of their heresy."
"Character demonstrates itself in trifles."
"The hand betrays the heart."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"[Guiney] revels in all the richness of the literary past, having made it her own beyond peradventure. To read her is much of an education in the paths – particularly in the choice and least-frequented paths – of English letters." Helen Tracy Porter, American translator and writer
"Her tastes were severely classical while her spirit was vibrantly romantic." Henry Fairbank, biographer
"Her recognition of seventeenth-century poetry as one of the best of possible models for a vigorous modern poetic justifies the Guiney scholarship which has persisted since her death." Michele J. Leggott, poet
Interests
nature, dogs, walking
Writers
William Hazlitt, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Connections
Louise Imogen Guiney was never married and didn't have children.