Coleridge, Sara (1802–1852)

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Coleridge, Sara (1802–1852)

English writer. Born at Greta Hall, near Keswick, England, on December 23, 1802; died on May 3, 1852; fourth child and only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sara Fricker Coleridge (whose sister Edith Fricker married Robert Southey); married her cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798–1843; a lawyer), in 1829; children: four, including Herbert Coleridge (1830–1861); lived in Hampstead, London, later in Chester Place, Regent's Park.

Sara Coleridge was born at Greta Hall, near Keswick, England, on December 23, 1802, the fourth child and only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sara Fricker. The Fricker sisters had a penchant for artists. Sara Fricker married poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Edith Fricker (d. 1837) married poet Robert Southey; and another sister married Robert Lovell, a Quaker poet. After 1803, all three couples lived together. William and Dorothy Wordsworth at Grasmere were their neighbors. Because of his wanderings and opium habit, Samuel Coleridge was often away from home, and "Uncle Southey" became the pater familias. Wordsworth, in his poem, the Triad, left a description, or "poetical glorification," as Sara Coleridge calls it, of the three little girls growing up in this milieu—his own daughter Dora, Edith May Southey , and Sara Coleridge the younger, the "last of the three, though eldest born." Greta Hall was Sara Coleridge's home until her marriage; and the literati of the Lake colony seem to have been her only teachers.

With the help of Southey and his library, Sara Coleridge was a successful autodidact whom William Wordsworth deemed "remarkably clever." Before she was 25, she had read the chief Greek and Latin classics and had learned French, German, Italian and Spanish. In 1822, she translated from the Latin Martin Dobritzhoffer's Account of the Abipones; in 1825, she translated the Memoirs of the Chevalier Bayard.

In September 1829, Sara Coleridge married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, at Crosthwaite Church, Keswick, after a seven-year engagement. He was then a chancery barrister in London. The first eight years of their married life were spent in a little cottage in Hampstead where four of her children were born, two of whom survived. In 1834, Sara Coleridge published Pretty Lessons for Little Children, which was primarily designed for her own children but speedily passed through several editions. After the Coleridges moved to Chester Place in Regent's Park, she also wrote her longest work, the romantic fairy tale Phantasmion (1837). Considered her best work, Phantasmion contained songs that were greatly admired at the time by Leigh Hunt and other critics.

On the death of Samuel Coleridge in 1834, Sara's husband was appointed his literary executor; Sara then took on these duties following the demise of her husband in 1843. She edited Aids to Reflection, Notes on Shakespeare and the Dramatists, and Essays on his own Times; the elaborate discourses that she appended to these works illustrate the scope of her knowledge as well as her critical and analytical ability. She labored over her father's works for the rest of her life, until illness intervened in 1850. She died in London on May 3, 1852.

Shortly before her death, Sara Coleridge wrote an autobiographical fragment, covering her first nine years, for her daughter. This work was then completed by her daughter and published in 1873, together with some of her letters, under the title Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge. Providing a view into a cultured and highly speculative mind, the letters contain many fitting appraisals of known people and books, and are especially interesting for their allusions to Wordsworth and the Lake Poets.