Mary E. Coleridge

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

Biography

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was born in Hyde Park Square, London, the daughter of Arthur Duke Coleridge, who was a lawyer and influential amateur musician. 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 was educated at home, mostly by the poet and educationalist W. J. Cory, and began writing poetry as a child. She 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, published in February 1893 by Chatto & Windus. The story (which is unrelated to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus legend) centres on a mysterious "Brotherhood" involved in the production of a play in a nineteenth-century German town. It received mixed reviews. The novel was credited only to "M. E. Coleridge", which led at least one newspaper to assume that the author was a man.