Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth (1861–1907)

British poet, novelist, and critic. Born in London, England, on September 23, 1861; died in Harrogate, Yorkshire, England, on August 25, 1907; daughter of Arthur Duke Coleridge (clerk of the Assize on the midland circuit) and Mary Anne (Jameson) Coleridge; educated at home; never married; no children.

Selected writings:

The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (novel, 1893); Fancy's Following (poems, 1896); Fancy's Guerdon (poems, 1897); The King with Two Faces (novel, 1897); Non Sequitur (sketches, 1900); The Fiery Dawn (novel, 1901); The Shadow on the Wall (novel, 1904); The Lady on the Drawing-Room Floor (novel, 1906); Life of Holman Hunt (biography, 1908); Last Poems (1905); Poems New and Old (1907); Gathered Leaves (stories and essays, 1910).

The great-great-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Coleridge was educated at home, where she was influenced by a steady stream of literary visitors. Tutored by her father's friend, poet William Johnson Cory (1823–1892), Coleridge began writing verses and stories at an early age, although as a young girl she was more interested in becoming a painter than a writer. In 1893, she published her first novel, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which was highly praised by Robert Louis Stevenson, though it went unnoticed by the critics. Two collections of poems, Fancy's Following (1896) and Fancy's Guerdon (1897), both published under a pseudonym, met with more success. Her breakthrough came with The King with Two Faces (1897), a historical romance based on the assassination of Gustavus III of Sweden, which established her reputation and was followed by a number of successful novels, mostly historical in nature. Coleridge also contributed articles to the Monthly Review, the Guardian, the Cornhill Magazine, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Coleridge, who never married, devoted a great deal of time teaching working women in her home and at the Working Women's College. She died suddenly of appendicitis in 1907, just short of her 46th birthday. A volume of work, Poems New and Old, was published the year of her death, and additional poems were added to a 1954 edition. Coleridge's poetry, recognized today over her novels and essays, is seen as a precursor to 20th-century poetry in its preoccupation with dreams, psychic states, and the problems of identity. In appraising her work, poet and critic Robert Bridges wrote: "It is the intimacy and spontaneity of her poems that will give them their chief value."