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Anna Wickham |
Born in London and raised in Australia, Edith Alice Mary Harper returned to England and studied to be an opera singer. But her husband objected, so she began writing poetry under the name of Anna Wickham. He objected to that, too, and when her first book was announced, they quarreled; she put her fist through a glass door, and he had her committed to an asylum. Husbands could do that.
When she got out six weeks later her view of marriage had forever changed, and she set off to live the Bohemian life in Bloomsbury. The anthologist Louis Untermeyer, one of her champions, described her as “a magnificent gypsy of a woman who always entered a room as if she had just stamped across the moors”.
Over the years she tried to balance the duties of being a mother with the freedom of being an artist. But she felt she had failed in both her poetry and in her life, and hanged herself at sixty-three.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |