Sarah Doudney was born on 15 January 1841 in Portsea, Hampshire, at a time when the crowded naval and commercial communities around Portsmouth were expanding alongside Victorian Britain’s confidence in trade, empire, religion, and print. She was the daughter of a soap and candle manufacturer, and the practical details of that background matter. Although later summaries have sometimes simplified it into a “working-cla…
“There are women to whom nature has granted the gift of silent emotion. They have mobile faces, changeful eyes, soft lips, which express joy or desolation naturally, and with the charm of perfect simplicity and truth.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Helen Dudley was born on 3 June 1886 in Chicago, Illinois, and died in 1932, leaving behind a body of work that was small in quantity but unusually concentrated in feeling. Her name has never become as familiar as those of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, H. D., Amy Lowell, or Elinor Wylie, yet her poems belong to the same unsettled and fertile era in American writing. She wrote during the transition from late…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair