Description
Poet Anna Wickham, a neglected figure in early 20th-century literature, is the subject of this biography. The book details her flight from her husband and sons to live with Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris, and her friendships with members of a literary circle that included D. H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell.
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Like the lives of fellow poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sylvia Plath, the life of Anna Wickham (1883-1947) was turbulent, trailblazing, and ultimately tragic. This biography is the first ever to illuminate the British poet's life, from her strange and violent birth through her suicide.Anna fell in love and married handsome solicitor Patrick Hepburn in 1906. They started a family, but Anna began writing poetry, an endeavor that Patrick found irrelevant - and threatening. Eventually, he had Anna forcibly committed to a mental hospital. Ironically, it was there that Anna, "stimulated by her incarceration," wrote more than eighty poems (she went on to write over 1,400). Upon her release, publisher Harold Monro befriended Anna and published her poetry. Her verse led the way for the Early Modernist poetry movement.Anna and Patrick separated in 1926. Soon afterward, she traveled to Paris's Left Bank, where she met her muse and lifelong - albeit unrequited - love: Natalie Barney, the lesbian American millionairess.Based on exclusive interviews with Anna's family and newly discovered correspondence, and including over a dozen of her most daring poems, this stunning book captures Anna Wickham in full, while simultaneously introducing this poet to a new generation of readers.
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