Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (23 September 1861 – 25 August 1907) was a British novelist and poet who also wrote essays and reviews.[1] She wrote poetry under the pseudonym Anodos, taken from George MacDonald; other influences on her were Richard Watson Dixon and Christina Rossetti. Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, described her poems as 'wonderously beautiful… but mystical rather and enigmatic'.[2]

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Mary Coleridge was the daughter of Arthur Duke Coleridge. With the singer Jenny Lind, her father was responsible for the formation of the London Bach Choir in 1875. Other family friends included Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, John Millais and Fanny Kemble. She was the great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the great niece of Sara Coleridge, the author of Phantasmion.

Coleridge travelled widely throughout her life, although her home was in London, where she lived with her family. She taught at the London Working Women's College for twelve years from 1895 to 1907.

She completed five novels. Her first was The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which Chatto & Windus published in February 1893 as by M. E. Coleridge. At least one newspaper noted it as "a new story by Mr M. E. Coleridge".[3] The story is not related to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus legend; it features a modern Brotherhood which takes that name.[4] Edward Arnold published the other four novels. The best known is The King with Two Faces, which earned her £900 in royalties in 1897.

Coleridge died of complications arising from appendicitis while on holiday in Harrogate in 1907, leaving an unfinished manuscript for her next novel and hundreds of unpublished poems.

Eight of her poems, including "The Blue Bird" (originally published in 1897 under the French title "L'Oiseau Bleu"),[5] were set to music for chorus by Charles Villiers Stanford, and three poems including "Thy Hand in Mine" were set by Frank Bridge. A family friend, the composer Hubert Parry, also set several of her poems as songs for voice and piano. And Cyril Rootham (an erstwhile pupil of Stanford and Parry) set four of her poems for solo voice and orchestra, though when published in 1913 the songs were rewritten for voice and piano.

Coleridge's poetry was first published under her own name in the posthumous Poems (1908). In the preface to this volume, Henry Newbolt wrote:[6]

As a poetess, Mary Coleridge never came before the public under her own name; her printed verse was always either anonymous or signed with the pseudonym ’Άνοδος — a name taken from George Macdonald's romance, "Phantastes," where it is evidently intended to bear the meaning of "Wanderer." Probably several reasons or feelings prompted this concealment; the one by which my own arguments were always met was the fear of tarnishing the name which an ancestor had made illustrious in English poetry [...] I believe that no poems are less likely than these to jar upon lovers of "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner."