Guiney, Louise Imogen (1861–1920)

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Guiney, Louise Imogen (1861–1920)

American poet, known as the "Laureate of the Lost," who wrote over 30 books. Name variations: often signed poetry L.I.G. Born on January 7, 1861, in Roxbury, Massachusetts; died in Chipping Camden, England, on November 2, 1920; daughter of General Patrick Robert Guiney (a Union army general) and Jenny Guiney; never married; no children.

A scholar when mankind had no use for women scholars, Louise Imogen Guiney was brilliant, inquisitive, and had a keen wit. "Her tastes were severely classical," wrote her biographer Henry Fairbanks, "while her spirit was vibrantly romantic." As a talented classicist, Guiney would have been comfortable teaching at an ivy-covered hall. Instead, she spent her days, like many women in the 19th century, trying to find a way to make a living.

Guiney's predilection for scholarship was not always thus; initially, her need for independence took precedence. She wrote of her first school experience:

I did not like the looks of the teacher; I disliked the room. I looked the children over, and made up my mind I did not like them either, and that if I ever got out of the place no mortal power should get me back again. I remember that the teacher tried to make me take part in the exercises, but I was mute; the sphinx herself was not more obstinately dumb than I was.
I made no demonstration at home, but waited until next morning when preparations were made to send me up to school again. Then I quietly informed them that I was not going anymore. … I did not cry: I simply stood still and refused to budge. I only yielded to superior force, for my mother took my head and the nurse my heels, and I was ignominiously lugged to school. But I did not give in. As fast as they put me in the room, I dashed out; and finally I was tied in my chair. That was the way I went to school every day, until convinced that I was conquered.

At age 11, Guiney entered boarding school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Providence, Rhode Island, where she would remain for seven years, leaving in 1879. While there, her beloved father died. General Patrick Guiney had been a commanding officer of the 9th Massachusetts Volunteers. Wounded in the Civil War at the Battle of the Wilderness, he wore an eyepatch over his eyeless socket. In 1877, at age 42, "while crossing Franklin Square Park on his way home," wrote Fairbanks, "the veteran felt a spurt of blood to his lips. Instinctively, with the composure that marked his conduct under fire at Gaines' Mill and the Wilderness (thirty engagements in all), he removed his hat, knelt down beside a tree and crossed himself. Within seconds, he was dead, still propped against the tree in this attitude of reverence." Louise would one day write an essay about the incident, titled "On Dying Considered as a Dramatic Consideration." At his death, the general left Louise and her mother Jenny Guiney "more glory than dollars." Louise turned to writing to help support the household which consisted of her mother, her Aunt Betty, and sundry dogs and cats. A lover of nature, Guiney could be seen striding briskly beside the Charles River with her beloved St. Bernards. Throughout her life, she was never without a pet, mostly dogs.

In 1884, with the successful publication of her poetry collection Songs at the Start, Guiney became a recognized poet at age 23. She had articles published in The Atlantic, was a frequent contributor to the juvenile magazine Wide Awake, and became a popular member of the literati; one of her many admirers was Oliver Wendell Holmes. She was also a salon attendee at the home of Louise Chandler Moulton , a lifelong friend of Alice Brown , and a prodigious correspondent who had many epistolary friendships. Her letters to Herbert E. Clarke, Clement Shorter, Reverend William H. van Allen, and Charles Knowles Bolton (librarian of the Boston Athenaeum) all contain thoughts on religion, literature, public and daily life, and the movement to restore John Keats to his rightful place in the literary pantheon. Nine hundred of her letters to her good friend Fred Holland Day reside in the Library of Congress.

In May 1889, Guiney traveled to England with her mother for an extended stay. Residing mostly in London, she also journeyed to Ireland, made friends with the Sigerson sisters, Dora and Hester , and wrote a short biography of Irish patriot Robert Emmet (1904), before returning to Auburndale in 1891. Two years later, she published another collection of poetry, A Roadside Harp. Guiney's scholarly pursuits led her to little known heroes. Count Henri de La Rochejaquelin, leader of France's provincial rebellion of 1793–95, could be found in the pages of her Monsieur Henry (1892); she also wrote of Thomas William Parsons, translator and first American publisher of Dante's Divine Comedy.

"We are poor but honest, and have been growing poorer and no honester," she wrote a friend. Since she could not profit by her erudition, she was encouraged by friends to seek the vacant postmaster position at Auburndale in 1893. To Guiney's alarm, her application to President Grover Cleveland caused a stir throughout the nation. Wisecracks abounded in the national dailies about the woman of letters becoming a woman of letters. Wrote Henry Sherman Wyer in the Transcript:

What's this I read of thee, Louise …
That thou a poet in thy prime
A princess in the realm of rhyme,
Art fettered to old Father Time,
His last Postmistress!

Is't possible those dainty lays
That all the world delights to praise
No more enable thee to raise
The needful shilling?

Our times, indeed, are out of joint,
When one whom critics all anoint
Must needs ask Grover to appoint
Her Queen of Letters.

In answer to an inquiry of Charles E.L. Wingate, a columnist for The Critic, Guiney wrote:

It is no eccentricity or ambition (!) or restlessness that makes me willing to accept (should it be given me) an office flung at my door. I must arise and hew my way. Like all
rational folk, I had much rather loaf. Postmistressing, luckily, is a thing I can do; that is, until the fatal day when the Public shall command me to hand through the grating sixteen five-cent stamps, eighty-seven fours, twenty twos, and nine ones, and make change for them out of a ten-dollar bill. When that hour strikes, pray for me.

In January 1894, Guiney was appointed to fill the vacancy. For the next three and a half years, she lived behind the grate, 11 hours a day. "My bread-winning began in 1894, and my poetry ended," she wrote. "The Muse, poor lass, is scared off utterly." Though she did not write a line of poetry in those years, Guiney managed to publish a few scholarly books. "Quick to champion slighted worth," wrote Fairbanks, she wrote of those who had been shunted aside historically. A Little English Gallery (1894) contained studies of Lady Danvers , Henry Vaughan, George Farquhar, Topham Beauclerk, and Bennet Langton; she also wrote of Irish poet James Clarence Mangan. Patrins, a compilation of her essays, received a large printing and went into a second edition, while her preface to Prosper Mérimée's Carmen was much lauded.

But there were those in the town of Auburndale who were extremely unhappy with the appointment of an Irish Catholic as postmaster. When pressure groups tried to have her expelled, friends and admirers throughout the United States came to her side. Wrote Arlo Bates, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): "A lady of highest character, of rich and unusual gifts, of perfect official rectitude,—the daughter of a brave and patriotic officer in the Union army,—is being hounded out of her means of livelihood by a company of narrow-minded and violent fanatics, simply on account of her faith. The thing would be incredible were it not actual."

Guiney wrote to Dora Sigerson:
The fuss about my office, I regret to say, absurd as it seems, was no myth, and gave me great worry. Auburndale is a town populated with retired missionaries, and bigots of small intellectual calibre. … I had some rather rough sailing, thanks purely to my being a Catholic, i.e., one likely at any given moment to give over the government mail, and the safe keys, to the Pope! … I am somewhat broken in, now, and somewhat broken up, too!

Accompanied by her friend Alice Brown, Guiney took a short sabbatical to England in the spring of 1895. In 1897, after spending six weeks recovering from a physical breakdown due to overwork, which had been misdiagnosed as meningitis, she resigned her post on July 5, looking forward to freedom, she said, and the almshouse. A consolidation of six post offices had brought a reduction in salary.

Though solicited to join the Atlantic's "Men and Letters" department, she could not live on the proceeds. Instead, she sought an interview, with the help of Sarah Orne Jewett , at the Boston Public Library. On her application, Guiney made no mention of 12 books published and her long list of scholarly essays: "Know something of typewriting and a couple of foreign languages. Can read proof expertly."

"After January 1st, 1899, I am to do chores of cataloguing at the Boston Public Library," she wrote Herbert E. Clarke, "probably until I get pneumonia or cerebrospinal paralysis. Regular work always makes me come down with sickness. … It is really ludicrous. Gimme Liberty, or gimme death, seem to be my nature's motto." With her mother, she moved to Pinckney Street in Boston, within walking distance of the library; they took in boarders, and she reluctantly began work.

During her two year tenure at the BPL (January 1899–December 1900), she published Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems (1899) and The Martyrs' Idyl and Shorter Poems (1899); in the latter, she turned to religion for solace. Guiney gamely chafed once again under the 9-to-5 prison. "Some day, when I am free," she wrote Dora Sigerson, "I am going to emigrate to some hamlet that smells strong of the Middle Ages, and put cotton-wool in my ears, and swing out clear from this very smart century altogether."

Help came in the form of sculptor Anne Whitney who offered Guiney $5,000 to finance a long-held wish, to live in or near Oxford, England. On February 1901, with her Aunt Betty in tow, Guiney sailed to England on a boat named the Devonian, along with five passengers and 700 head of cattle. Though her aunt died there the following year and the medical bills were staggering, Guiney remained, reading proofs for a New York publisher and often taking up residence in the British Museum Reading Room or the Bodleian Library, increasingly interested in Catholic subjects. Except for two minor trips back to America, one of them to attend her dying mother in 1909–10, Louise Guiney would live in England until her death in 1920.

Though she was proud of her heritage, she was running from celebrity and appreciated the right of seclusion not deigned her in America. The artist "will not be asked by an interviewer at 4 a.m., and at the point of a moral bayonet, for his impressions concerning problems fiscal or forensic. If he is understood to have exhibited in the Salon, or to have published a sonnet, not a living British creature will think any the better of him for it."

Danvers, Lady Magdalene (1561–1627)

English patron of the arts. Name variations: Magdalene Danvers; Magdalene Herbert. Born in 1561; died in 1627; buried at Chelsey church on July 1, 1627; married Richard Herbert (died); married Sir John Danvers of Wilts (1588–1655); children: (first marriage) Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648, a philosopher and historian); George Herbert (1593–1633, an orator).

Lady Magdalene Danvers was born in 1561. The mother of George Herbert and close friend of John Donne, Lady Danvers was a generous patron of letters. On her death, she was buried at Chelsey church; John Donne preached her funeral sermon.

With her orphaned cousins Grace and Ruth Guiney , as well as Louise Mary Martin , a granddaughter of her uncle, Guiney lived in a small cottage throughout World War I. Eventually, in 1916, she had to abandon the cottage for lack of funds, renting rooms or staying with friends. Just getting by continued to hamper her writing.

For her last seven years, though a touch deaf, Guiney worked on Recusant Poets 1535–1745, concerning poets of the Catholic underground hiding from parliamentary persecution. Completed by Grace Guiney, the book would be published posthumously in 1939. Wrote Fairbanks: "Besides preserving the authentic voice of catacombed Catholicism, Recusant Poets is a stirring record of independence in the face of oppression." During Guiney's stay in England, her poetry was also published in Harper's Monthly, Atlantic Monthly, Current Literature, Nation, Century, Dublin Review, Catholic World, and McClure's. A collection entitled Happy Ending appeared in 1909. Her prose again revived forgotten figures: essayist Lionel Johnson, the Oxford Movement's J.A. Froude and William Cartwright, and poets Katherine Philips and Thomas Stanley.

On September 8, 1920, Louise Guiney suffered a stroke, losing her ability to speak. She never recovered and died on November 2, All Souls' Day, at Chipping Camden. Wrote her cousin Grace: "In the final 5½ hours she was entirely unconscious. Her last conscious act, at 11 o'clock Monday night, was to put her arm over my shoulders & draw my head down beside hers." Louise Guiney was buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford; the inscription on the Celtic cross was Delassata (very tired).