Laurence Alma-Tadema

Laurence Alma-Tadema (August 1865 – 12 March 1940), born Laurense Tadema, was a British writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who worked in many genres.

Early life

Alma-Tadema was born in Brussels in 1865. She was the eldest daughter of the Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) and his first wife Marie-Pauline Gressin-Dumoulin de Boisgirard.

Laurence lived in the cottage "The Fair Haven", Wittersham, Kent, and she involved herself with music and plays with the villagers and their children, going on to construct a building to seat a hundred people, used for musical concerts and plays, which she named "Hall of Happy Hours". She mostly divided her time between a flat in Paris and her cottage in Wittersham. She never married, and died in a nursing home in London on 12 March 1940. Her stepmother, Lady Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema (1852–1909) and younger sister Anna Alma-Tadema (1867–1943) were noted visual artists.

Literary work

Alma-Tadema's first novel, Love's Martyr, was published in 1886. In addition to her own collections of stories and poems, which she often published herself, Alma-Tadema wrote two novels, songs and works on drama; she also made translations. The Orlando Project says about Alma-Tadema's writing that the "characteristic tone is one of intense emotion, but in prose and verse she has the gift of compression". She contributed widely to periodicals, notably The Yellow Book, and also edited one herself. Some of Alma-Tadema's plays were successfully produced in Germany.

Alma-Tadema's poem "If No One Ever Marries Me", written in 1897 and published in Realms of Unknown Kings, saw performances as a song in the 21st century by Natalie Merchant on her double album Leave Your Sleep. In 1900 it had been included in the musical score, The daisy chain, cycle of twelve songs of childhood by Liza Lehmann, and in 1922 in the musical score Little girls composed by Louise Sington.