Louise Imogen Guiney

For other people with this last name, see Guiney.

Louise Imogen Guiney, ca. 1900

Louise Imogen Guiney
Photograph by Fred Holland Day (1893)

Louise Imogen Guiney (17 January 1861 – 2 November 1920) was an American poet, essayist and editor, born in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Biography

The daughter of Gen. Patrick R. Guiney, an Irish-born American Civil War officer and lawyer, and Jeannette Margaret Doyle, she was raised as a Christian and educated at a convent school and in Providence, Rhode Island, from which she graduated in 1879.

Over the next 20 years, she worked at various jobs, including serving as a postmistress and working in the field of cataloging at the Boston Public Library. She was a member of several literary and social clubs, and according to her friend Ralph Adams Cram was "the most vital and creative personal influence" on their circle of writers and artists in Boston (see Visionists).

In 1901, Guiney moved to Oxford, England, to focus on her poetry and essay writing. She soon began to suffer from illness and was no longer able to write poetry, instead concentrating on critical and biographical studies of Catholic poets and writers.

Guiney died of a stroke near Gloucestershire, England, at age 59, leaving much of her work unfinished.

Works

• Songs at the Start (1884; poetry)
• Goose-Quill Papers (1885; essays)
• The White Sail and Other Poems (1887; poetry)
• Brownies and Bogles (1888; poetry)
• Monsieur Henri: A Foot-Note to French History (1892; historical essay)
• A Roadside Harp (1893; poetry)
• A Little English Gallery (1895; essays)
• Robert Louis Stevenson (1895; biography, with Alice Brown)
• Lovers' Saint Ruth's and Three Other Tales (1895; short stories)
• Nine Sonnets Written at Oxford (1895; poetry)
• Patrins (1897; essays)
• England and Yesterday (1898; poetry)
• The Martyrs' Idyl and Shorter Poems (1899; poetry)
• Robert Emmet (1904)
• The Princess of the Tower (1906; poetry)
• Blessed Edmund Campion (1908)
• Happy Ending (1909; poetry, her collected verse)
• Letters (1926; 2 vols., posthumously)
• Recusant Poets (1939; ed., with Geoffrey Bliss; posthumously)

References

• NNDB
• Fairbanks, Henry G., Louise Imogen Guiney, New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1975. ISBN 978-0805703429.
• Lucey, William L., "Louise I. Guiney on American Woman Poets," Boston Public Library Quarterly, Vol. XII, 1960.
• Reichardt, Mary R. (ed.), Catholic Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, Portsmouth, NH: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2001. ISBN 978-0313311475.
• Tenison, E.M., Louise Imogen Guiney,: Her Life And Works, 1861-1920, London: Macmillan, London, 1923. ASIN: B000859GVG 1923.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: 

External links

• Works by Louise Imogen Guiney at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Louise Imogen Guiney at Hathi Trust
• Works by Louise Imogen Guiney at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Essays by Louise Imogen Guiney at Quotidiana.org
• Louise Imogen Guiney Papers, 1884-1979 (bulk 1884-1921), Vassar College Libraries
• Louise Imogen Guiney Collection: Late nineteenth-century works by this American poet and essayist, (95 titles). From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress