Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Coleridge lived with her family all her life, choosing to remain single and dedicate herself to her work. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a number of other Victorian women poets, she was committed to a rigorous programme of self-education, reading widely in literature and history, teaching herself a number of modern languages, and studying Greek and classics with a small group of female friends (the “Grecian Ladies”) under the tutelage of William Cory, an ex-Eton schoolmaster and himself a poet. Throughout her life Coleridge would support women’s rights to education and the intellectual liberty it engendered, defending this position in her poem “A Clever Woman” (“…woman’s woman, even when/ She reads her Ethics in the Greek”). Indeed, from 1895 until her death, influenced by her understanding of Tolstoy’s religious humanism, Coleridge taught grammar and literature to working-class women, firstly in her own home and then at the Working Women’s College.



Coleridge at first wanted to be a painter and she remained fascinated by art throughout her life, championing Pre-Raphaelitism and forming close relations with a number of its exponents (Holman Hunt asked her to write his biography which was eventually published after her death). A number of her poems deal with art works (e.g. “On a Bas-Relief of Pelops and Hippodameia”).



Coleridge soon found literature to be her vocation, however, and from the age of twenty she began publishing articles and reviews, which she continued to do throughout her life, in journals and newspapers as varied as Charlotte Yonge’s Monthly Packet, the Monthly Review, the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. Her essays, collected together in Non Sequitur (1900) and posthumously in Gathered Leaves (1910), are generally lively, firmly constructed and well argued, and include discussions of gender roles, the literary world, the nature of biography, and hero-worship, as well as studies of individuals Coleridge particularly admired, including Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the mystic poet Canon Dixon.



In 1893 Coleridge published her first novel, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which was well received and particularly admired by Robert Louis Stevenson. Four further novels were to follow over the next decade: The King with Two Faces (1897), which was her most successful work; The Fiery Dawn (1901); The Shadow on the Wall (1904); and The Lady on the Drawing-Room Floor (1906). Her novels are mostly historical romances which draw upon real-life figures such as Madame deStaël, Balzac, the Duchess of Berri and King Gustav III of Sweden, and have, at their best, strong characterisation and dramatic plots. There is, however, an unevenness in quality and they have been mostly forgotten in the twentieth century.



Rather, it is now acknowledged that Coleridge’s greatest skills were channelled into her poetry, a body of work which hardly achieved attention during her lifetime. Coleridge wrote over 260 lyric poems which often have great power, energy and intensity. However, she was extremely reluctant to publish them until she was encouraged by Robert Bridges, who thought her a poet of great originality. In 1896, following Bridge’s editorial advice, she published Fancy’s Following, a collection of forty-eight poems, and the next year she published Fancy’s Guerdon, although this only had seven new poems in it. Unlike her prose writings which were published under her own name, Coleridge used the pseudonym “Anodos” for her poetry, a name appropriated from George MacDonald’s 1858 romance, Phantastes and which means “the Wanderer”. The pseudonym clearly indicated the anxiety Coleridge felt in writing in the wake of her famous ancestors, and it was only after her death that her poems were collected and published under her own name.



Coleridge’s poems show her love of the surreal, unearthly and enigmatic, with works such as “Wilderspin”, “Ghosts” and “Horror” recalling the poetry of her great-great-uncle (she was called “the tail of the comet S.T.C.” (Gathered Leaves, p11)). Often, however, she uses gothic elements politically to reveal problems in heterosexual love and the institution of marriage. “The Witch”, “Master and Guest” and “Delusion” all centre upon female protagonists as entrapped victims or wandering outsiders, whilst her most famous poem, “The Other Side of a Mirror”, portrays the female as a divided self whose double is a crucified Christ figure suffering from a “hideous wound” caused, the poem suggests, by dominant gender ideologies.



Other poems propose some kind of resolution to these problems through female solidarity and sisterhood, one of the many connections to be made with one of Coleridge’s largest influences, Christina Rossetti. The powerful poem “The White Women”, for example, depicts a separatist female community where a band of powerful Amazonian women live free from all socially-inscribed restrictions, never having “bowed their necks beneath the yoke”, speaking their own language, and proving fatal, Medusa-like, to any man who looks on them. Similarly, the sharp critique of marriage in the poem of that name highlights the more attractive alternative of female friendship and a “wantonly free” intellectual and physical independence.



This commitment to independence in her work firmly aligns Coleridge with the fin-de-siècle New Woman and is also to be found in her religious poems. Although devout, Coleridge rejected the dedicated Church of England following of her parents and constantly questioned the usefulness of the established church. Poems such as “Doubt” and “Goodness” also point to a spiritual questioning engendered by post-Darwinian thinking. As she wrote in “Every Man For His Own Hand”, “I many not call what many call divine,/ And yet my faith is faith in its degree”. Rather, in poems such as “O Earth, my mother!” and “Two Heavens”, she celebrates feminised nature as an alternative religion, thus aligning herself with a number of nature-worshipping women poets such as Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson. Clearly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites in language, form and subject, other Coleridge poems deal with isolation, lost love, mysticism and death, whilst a number, including “In London Town”, “The Train” and “Street Lanterns”, show her to be an astute social commentator who to some degree prefigures central concerns of modernism.



Coleridge died at the age of 45 from appendicitis when on holiday in Yorkshire. Like many nineteenth-century women poets, she was lost from view for most of the twentieth century but has recently started to be reread and reassessed as an important late-Victorian literary voice whose works, at their best, are challenging and powerful.









The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus - Coleridge, Mary

1893



Fancy’s Following - Coleridge, Mary

1896



The King with Two Faces - Coleridge, Mary

1897



Fancy’s Guerdon - Coleridge, Mary

1897



Non Sequitur - Coleridge, Mary

1900



The Fiery Dawn - Coleridge, Mary

1901



The Shadow on the Wall - Coleridge, Mary

1904



The Lady on the Drawing-Room Floor - Coleridge, Mary

1906



Gathered Leaves - Coleridge, Mary

1907 [Post. 1910]