MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was born in London, England on 23 September 1861. Her great-great uncle was the Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and her great aunt was Sara Coleridge (1802-1852), author of Phantasmion (1837). Mary's father, Arthur Duke Coleridge was one of the prime movers behind the formation of the London Bach Choir in 1875. Arthur was a talented tenor, and had considered a career as an opera singer. However, he rejected it as a full-time profession on moral grounds and instead became a Clerk to the Assizes, working on the Midlands Circuit for fifty-four years. Nevertheless, there was much of the performer in Arthur Coleridge, and in her collection of Mary Coleridge's poems (1954), Theresa Whistler paints a vivid picture of the head of the Coleridge household. Arthur was, 'a genial, magnificent figure with a face that would look well on a Roman coin, his shock of wavy grey hair poked forward over his open brow 

The Coleridge family was impressively well connected and several evenings a week the door would be opened perhaps to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, or the artists, Holman Hunt and Sir John Everett. Likewise, it may have been the actress, Fanny Kemble paying a visit, or the singer Jenny Lind, with her husband, the conductor, Otto Goldschmidt. In Mary's 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' (201).

Mary was a shy child, scared of the dark and its shadows, but she had a naturally enquiring mind. At the age of twelve she became fascinated with the shape of Hebrew lettering and asked her father to teach her the language. She quickly became fluent in Hebrew as well as in French, German and Italian. In her mid twenties, she would read Greek nude the tutelage of William Cory, who had been Master at Eton when her father was a student there.

The publication of Mary'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 Mary to give her advice prior to publishing the small collection

 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'.