(Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (23 September 1861 – 25 August 1...)
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (23 September 1861 – 25 August 1907) was a British novelist and poet. Fancy's Guerdon was originally published in 1897 under the pseudonym Anodos and contains 18 of her poems.
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1897
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1897
(The Lady on the Drawingroom Floor with Selected Poetry an...)
The Lady on the Drawingroom Floor with Selected Poetry and Prose, by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, seeks to reclaim Coleridge’s reputation as a novelist, poet, critic, and educator by featuring familiar works alongside unpublished or out-of-print works. This collection includes a substantial introduction to Coleridge, analyzing her life and legacy; the whole of Coleridge’s final published novel; and a selection of important poems, short stories, essays, and letters. This discussion of her career invites the reader to consider her poetry and other writing alongside the novel that early critics called her most reflective and mature. In restoring the integrity of Coleridge’s literary canon, this volume offers new ways of understanding the complexities of an innovative Victorian writer who deserves to be better known and featured more prominently in anthologies and college courses. This collection is intended to introduce scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and the general reading public to Coleridge’s specific and considerable contributions to late-Victorian literature.
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1906
(Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was born on 23rd September 1861 ...)
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was born on 23rd September 1861 in London. She was a teacher at the London Working Women's College from twelve years from 1895 to 1907. She wrote poetry under the pseudonym Anodos and her poetry was described by the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges as, the Poet Laureate, described her poems as "wonderously beautiful but mystical rather and enigmatic". Mary also published five novels, the best known of those being The King with Two Faces. She loved to travel and did so, although her home was with her family in London. Mary was the great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the great niece of Sara Coleridge, the author of Phantasmion. She died from complications arising from appendicitis while on holiday in Harrogate on August 25th, 1907, leaving an unfinished manuscript for her next novel and hundreds of unpublished poems.
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2014
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was born on September 23, 1861 in London to the family of a lawyer Arthur Duke Coleridge and Mary Anne Jameson and is descended from good poetic stock. Her parents were great followers of the arts and Mary grew up in the company of some of the greatest writers of her day. Tennyson, Ruskin, Kemble, Holman Hunt, Millais and Browning and other creative contemporaries were among them.
Coleridge was well educated at home, learning a number of languages: French, German, Italian and including Hebrew (taught her by her father) and ancient Greek (taught by the ex-Etonian teacher William Cory, with whom she studied Plato).
Nonetheless, it was literature, and Browning in particular, which took possession of Mary Coleridge from a very early age. After reading On A Balcony, she wrote, "I think it passed into my blood". In the late 1880's, Mary and a group of friends began to meet weekly at her home in Cromwell Place, London. They would discuss literature and read each other's poems and compositions. They became known as The Settee.
Mary Coleridge had been a published writer since the early 1880s when she began to write drama reviews and essays under a pen name for a publication called The Theatre. One of her earliest published works for this magazine was an essay called Her Grace, the Duchess, in 1884. She also produced items for the Times Literary Supplement and short stories and essays for magazines such as The Cornhill. However, Mary's first major literary publications came in the mid to late 1890s. In 1893, her first novel, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus was published by Chatto and Windus. Set in Germany, it is a dark tale of secret societies, literary rebellion, romance, disguise and brotherhood. The Seven Sleepers laid the foundations for Mary's future novels, with its secret and interchangeable identities. It was well received on publication and was praised by Robert Louis Stevenson.
The publication of Coleridge's poems came about when a friend plotted to have them read by a wider audience. Violet Hodgkin's cousin was married to the poet Robert Bridges. Violet arranged for the small white book of poems that Mary had copied out for her to be left where Bridges would see them, knowing that he would be unable to resist giving an opinion. He did so and insisted upon meeting Coleridge to give her advice prior to publishing the small collection. Mary, initially reluctant, eventually agreed to publication, but only if she could use a pseudonym. She chose "Anodos", meaning "Wanderer", the name of the hero in George MacDonald's 1858 novel, Phantastes. Bridges advised her to make alterations to most of her poems, but diffident though she was, Coleridge only accepted those changes which she thought would improve her work. Fancy's Following was published privately by the Daniel Press in 1896. In 1897, several of the poems were then re-printed along with some unseen works in Fancy's Guerdon.
Wanting some occupation that would do good, yet hating the sense of patronage implicit in philanthropy, in 1895 Coleridge began to teach grammar and then literature at the Working Women's College, a task she came to enjoy greatly. She worked there until her death.
Coleridge's second novel, The King with Two Faces was also published in 1897. It was an immediate success and earned its author £900 in royalties. It focused upon the life and death of the controversial King Gustav of Sweden, who reigned between 1792 and 1809. It is a story replete with masks and theatrical imagery. There is also the hint of a homoerotic subtext running through the story. Coleridge was influenced by the work of Sir Walter Scott and her first three novels are very much in his style of historical adventure stories. The Fiery Dawn was the last of this type of story. Yet again, it had a real-life historical figure as its main protagonist, focusing upon the rebellion in France in 1832, led by Caroline, Duchess of Berry (1798 - 1890).
Coleridge's fourth novel, The Shadow on the Wall, was published in 1904, and pastiches Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Murder, mystery, art and homoerotic pursuit are all brought together in this occasionally mischievous retort to Wilde. In 1900, Coleridge produced her collection of essays, Non Sequitur, a fascinating collection of personal reminiscences and views on art and literature. Even today, these essays resonate with wit and humor. In 1906, The Lady on the Drawing Room Floor became Coleridge's last published novel. It is a gentle tale of two lovers who swear to meet again after being separated for many years.
In 1907, Coleridge continued to write poetry and was working upon a medieval romance, which she titled Becq. She was also writing a short biography of the artist Holman Hunt, at the personal request of Hunt himself. In the summer of 1907, the Coleridges travelled to Harrogate in the north of England, a place Mary disliked, for their annual holiday. During their stay there, Mary was taken ill with appendicitis. An operation to remove her appendix took place, but Mary contracted blood poisoning and died on 25th August 1907. Unusually for the time, she was cremated and her ashes buried in the cemetery just around the corner from where she died. Her grave is still there, inscribed with her dates and a short quotation from St. Paul, which reads simply, Pure love.
Coleridge died from complications arising from appendicitis while on holiday in Harrogate in 1907, leaving an unfinished manuscript for her next novel and hundreds of unpublished poems.
Mary Coleridge's poetry and prose were warmly accepted by critics and her contemporary literary figures such as Robert Louis Stevenson. Eight of her most popular poems, including The Blue Bird, were set to music for chorus by Charles Villiers Stanford, and three poems including Thy Hand in Mine were set by Frank Bridge. A family friend, the composer Hubert Parry, also was inspired to set several of her poems as songs for voice and piano. And Cyril Rootham (an erstwhile pupil of Stanford and Parry) set four of her poems for solo voice and orchestra, though when published in 1913 the songs were rewritten for voice and piano.
(The Lady on the Drawingroom Floor with Selected Poetry an...)
1906(Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (23 September 1861 – 25 August 1...)
1897(Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was born on 23rd September 1861 ...)
2014Coleridge had an instinctive dislike of established Christian doctrines, and although she was not an atheist or even an agnostic, her own rather unconventional beliefs were closer to pantheism (God in everything) than to Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism. There was No Place Found and Delusion are examples of her diverse philosophy.
On the whole, she seems to have participated very little in the feminist debates of the day. Nonetheless, in Coleridge’s world men are rarely a source of comfort or security, being either oblivious or duplicitous. Coleridge once proclaimed that men and women are “separate in soul,” and that identity itself was a function of gender. It may not be surprising, therefore, that many of Coleridge’s poems (“Gone,” “Friends,” “Marriage”) are about loyalty in friendship, especially female friendship and solidarity.
Mary Coleridge was a shy child, scared of the dark and its shadows, but she had a naturally enquiring mind.
Quotes from others about the person
Robert Bridges:
"Wonderously beautiful but mystical rather and enigmatic."
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge married and had no children but had a lot of close and loyal friends.
Arthur Duke Coleridge was a nineteenth-century English lawyer who, as an amateur musician with influential connections, was the founder of The Bach Choir and the man who introduced the Mass in B minor by Johann Sebastian Bach to the English concert repertoire. He was also a cricketer who played first-class cricket for Cambridge University in 1850.
Mary Anne Jameson, was a member of the famous Jameson Whiskey family, and a cousin of Gugliemo Marconi, the inventor of the oscillating aerial, which enabled the first transatlantic wireless broadcast to take place between England and Canada in 1901.
Browning was a friend of Coleridge's family and her favorite poet. His works were a source of inspiration for her to become a writer and poet.
In her collection of essays, Non Sequitur (1900), she describes her feelings when she first saw Robert Browning step through her front door:
"I should like to think of another girl - as gay, as full of bold ambition and not so shy. I hope she will see the greatest man in the world come in, as I saw Robert Browning come through the door one evening, his hat under his arm".
