To judge by the number of quotes from Tennyson above Florence’s own
poems, he was Florence’s favourite.
However, several other poets are quoted by Florence above her own
poems. A very religious girl from a high
church background, Florence also read the works of the 17th century
poet George Herbert. A quote from
Herbert’s The Church Porch is above Florence’s poem Heart Strife. The title of Florence’s poem The Desire of
the Moth for the Star is another quote, this time from Shelley’s To----. To---- is a second title that Florence
bestowed on a poem of her own in conscious homage to a great poet. Florence’s To---- has above it a quote from
Wordsworth’s Ode - Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood. And though there must be many
poems called ‘spring’, Florence’s own poem Spring quotes Christina Rossetti’s
poem of that name.
Tennyson. Shelley. Wordsworth.
Christina Rossetti. All poets
still widely appreciated today. Florence’s
poems, however, also quote from poems by two men and one woman whose poetry has
suffered quite as much as Florence’s own since their deaths:
Hamilton Drummond, whose Sir Hildebrand and Other Poems was
published in 1882;
Louisa Sarah Bevington, of whom more below; and
Frederic Myers, whose long poem St Paul was enormously popular during
the 19th century but is completely unknown now. Frederick Myers became a convinced
spiritualist, although not an uncritical one - he was one of the founders of
the Society for Psychical Research.
Florence was not a member of the SPR but her mother was. Myers’ book Human Personality and its
Survival of Bodily Death was published in 1903 and Florence definitely read
it; a quote from it is above one of her later published poems.
Although extracts from poems she admired feature most in Short Poems
in Sunlight and Shade, Florence also chose quotes from a wide range of
other works including Jessie Fothergill’s novel First Violin;
Deuteronomy chapter 4 verse 29 in which Moses urges the Israelites to keep the
Commandments even after he’s no longer there to check; the translation by
Walter Herries Pollock of the French writer Musset’s Nuits; the Life
of George Eliot; and an issue of the Proceedings of the Liverpool
Literary and Philosophical Society.
Florence’s friend Margaret Bradley didn’t need encouragement to start
composing her own poems: biographies of her suggest that she always intended to
be a writer. However, Florence probably
did need encouragement. I was going to
suggest that the example of Christina Rossetti may have inspired her; but it
might equally well have deterred her.
Florence’s husband, Rev Henry Wynne ffoulkes, was her most important
supporter in her poetry writing: two poems in Short Poems in Sunlight and
Shade are dedicated to him and he seems to have been the inspiration behind
the basic idea of Florence’s Poems of Life and Form. That might mean that Florence didn’t start
writing poetry on a regular basis until after she and Henry were married, in
1881. Florence’s mother, Clara Jeffreys,
also urged her on. Florence’s A New Year’s
Wish was dedicated to her and the saddest poem in this early volume, the one
called In Memoriam, is words of spiritual comfort for a woman whose infant
child has died - as Clara Jeffreys’ eldest daughter had done, aged five months.
The theme of poems dedicated to particular people runs through Short
Poems in Sunlight and Shade and some of the dedicatees are easy enough to
identify: “H” is husband Henry; C.J. is Clara Jeffreys; “L.S.B.” is Louisa
Sarah Bevington. Two poems are dedicated
to Margaret Bradley, one as still unmarried - “M.L.B.” and one after her
marriage (1879) as “M.L.W.” However, I’ve
been defeated in my attempts to figure out the other dedicatees, “H.B.” - who
may be a child - and “E and A”. It’s a
pity about E and A especially, as Florence dedicated her poem Gold Must be
Tried by Fire to them. The poem’s title
refers to One Peter, chapter 1 verse 7, about the testing of Christian faith,
but the phrase has an alchemical ring about it and I really would have liked to
know who those dedicatees were.
In the tradition of George Herbert, many of Florence’s poems in Short
Poems in Sunlight and Shade are spiritual in nature, if not Christian, and
that is how they were seen by reviewers in the Cambridge Review and the Saturday
Review. The Saturday Review
was edited at that time by Walter Herries Pollock, whose translation of Musset
Florence had read; perhaps they knew each other. The Saturday Review described the poems as
having a “refreshing unaffectedness of utterance”. The Cambridge Review was less generous,
saying that Florence’s metaphors suffered from an “innocent banality” and that
there was “a certain charm” in her poetry’s “immaturity” - definitely a touch
of praising with faint damns.
SWEET EYES
The Saturday Review said that Florence’s work had a “sweet tunefulness”;
and the Nottingham Daily Guardian (Florence and her husband lived just
outside the city) thought that some of the poems in the volume would be good
set to music. So it’s not surprising
that the songwriter Mary Augusta Salmond should set to music one of Florence’s
poems. This was not a new work, written
specially for the purpose. Although the
sheet music calls the song ‘Sweet Eyes’, the words are Florence’s poem “To
L.S.B.” from Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade.
Mary Augusta Salmond was a few years younger than Florence. She was the daughter of a barrister and had
married Walter Salmond, an army officer and mining engineer. In the 1880s and 1890s they and their five
children lived near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, so it’s possible that Mary
Augusta and Florence knew each other.
However, they needn’t have met for Mary Augusta to use words by Florence
for her first published song - the earliest in the British Library catalogue,
that is - Mary Augusta may just have bought a copy of Short Poems in
Sunlight and Shade. Mary Augusta
composed a small number of other songs over the next 20 years; the latest work
by her in the BL catalogue is an anthem, published 1909. However, ‘Sweet Eyes’ was the only poem by
Florence that Mary Augusta used. She set
poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Coleridge and Kingsley but the only poet whose
works she used more than once was Helen Marion Burnside; Mary Augusta used
several of Burnside’s poems for compositions she called ‘plantation songs’.
QUESTIONS
Florence’s poem Questions was published in Lucifer: A Theosophical
Magazine in its issue of 15 February 1888.
It’s the only poem she published in its own right, rather than as part
of a larger volume. I’ve talked in my
other file about the crisis of faith that Florence was going through at this
time, which led to her joining the Theosophical Society and being initiated
into the Golden Dawn. Here I want to
print the poem and say that clearly, Florence found it a great deal easier to
express doubt in poetry than in prose.
What can we do in
temptation’s hour?
How shall we conquer
its fiery power?
How can we master it -
standing alone,
Just on the threshold
of things unknown?
Strong is its power as
Death and Hell,
Led by its lure, even
angels fell!
Dazed by the glare of a
rising light
How shall poor mortals
see aright?
Tempted we were in the
morning of life,
With earth’s simple
joys that are ever rife,
To idly bask in the sun’s
warm beam
And to care no jot for
a holier dream.
Tempted again in the
heyday sun,
To choose fair paths
and in gardens run,
Claiming as
ours, all joy - all love,
Flowerets of bliss from
the Heavens above.
Temptings come now, in
life’s later prime,
Deeper and stronger
than in past time,
To feed with fuel the
inward fire,
The passionate dream of
the Soul’s desire
Two feet are creeping
on paths unknown,
Weary and mournful sad,
and alone;
Two eyes are looking
and longing for light,
Two hands are locked in
a desperate fight.
A heart is breaking
with pain and grief,
A soul in strong agony
cries for relief;
Echoes no kindred chord
above?
Stretcheth no Hand in
responsive love?
Is our Great God, but a
God of stone?
Are we - His people -
dazed and alone?
Is there no Ear that
can hear us cry?
No Christ, - to succour
us e’er we die?
The italics are hers. Florence
always used a great deal of extra emphasis in her poems - phrases in italics,
exclamation marks, words in capitals - as if her feelings at particular points
in the writing demanded more than just the words. Her reviewer in The Cambridge Review
actually criticised her for that and hoped that as she gained confidence, she
wouldn’t need to do it any more; but she never gave it up.
Over twenty years passed between Questions, and Florence’s next
publication. A lot happened in during
that long period: she had reached some kind of resolution to her crisis of
faith; her husband and her father had both died; she and her sister had
inherited the family lands in North Wales but had decided to sell them rather
than take up residence and run the estates.
TO THE ARABS. ALLAH’S MESSAGE
I haven’t been able to find a single copy of this work. I didn’t even know it existed until I was
working through Poems of Life and Form and noticed an advert for it in
the unnumbered pages at the back. It was
a pamphlet, published in 1911 with poems by Florence and translations of them all
into Arabic. It was being circulated not
like a normal volume of poetry but like a religious tract. It had an introduction by Princess Frederica
of Hanover, so Florence may have been asked to write the poems by the RSPCA, of
which Princess Frederica was a patron. I
did find one other reference to To The Arabs, via the web; apparently some of
Florence’s poems had been set to music for it.
POEMS OF LIFE AND FORM
One set of poems later published in Poems of Life and Form had
been in print already. In 1908 Occult
Review published Florence’s The Seven Principles. The principles were theosophical, and
Florence wrote one sonnet for each: Sthula Sharira; Prana; Linga Sharira; Kama
Rupa; Manas; Buddhi; and Atma. In her
introduction, Florence explained that she had been trying to give as clear an
outline of each principle as she could manage, while keeping within the sonnet
form. She urged her readers to use the
sonnets as a basis for expansion on the “Dominant Chord” the sonnets are giving
them. The sonnets could have been
written at any time between the early 1890s and 1908, but it’s likely that they
had been written since about 1895: since Annie Besant had taken charge of the
Theosophical Society in England, she had led it away from the Buddhism that was
favoured in the 1880s and early 1890s, and towards Hinduism, her own
preference. The sonnets show Florence
keeping up her reading, and following where Besant was leading. I have
to say I thought the sonnets looked a bit odd, on the printed page. There are a lot of exclamation marks and
words in capital letters and I wonder if Florence wasn’t thinking of the poems
as something to be read aloud in a ritual context - a concept she would have
been familiar with both from high church services and from Golden Dawn rituals,
but not from theosophy as the TS dealt with theory only, not practice.
Florence clearly saw rendering these basics of theosophy as a set of
sonnets as a real test of her poetry-writing skills, and the idea of poetry as
challenge runs through Poems of Life and Form. It seems that someone - almost certainly
Florence’s husband Henry - had challenged her to write poems in as many of the
old forms of poetry as possible.
Florence had picked up the gauntlet and her struggles with these unfamiliar
forms had become quite a joke between her and her challenger - she wrote the
leg-pulling she was getting into some of the poems. Preparing the results for publication, she
arranged the poems in groups according to their form. The old forms she was using - some of which
were first used in the time of the troubadors - included the triolet; ballade;
rondeau; villanelle; kyrielle; sestina; and lai (which is not the same,
apparently, as a lay).
Poems of Life and Form differed from Short Poems in Light and Shade
in several ways. There were fewer
devotional poems, and some of those that are included in the volume are more
theosophical than Christian in tone. The
sources for the poems are more wide-ranging.
One set is based on Greek myths Florence may have heard discussed if she
and Henry ever went to stay with Margaret Woods - Margaret’s husband was an
Oxford University classicist. In one
poem, Sleep, there’s a reference to God as “the Holy Architect”, a concept of
the deity Florence must have picked up from her husband, who was a freemason.
There are two ballads written as if told by working men, with Florence perhaps
trying to catch the lilt and dialect spoken by her husband’s parishioners in
rural Nottinghamshire. The ballad is an
old poetic form but My Pal: A Modern Epic is right up-to-date in its theme: an
ex-soldier remembers a comrade who died while they were both stationed in the
Middle East.
One noticeable difference between Short Poems in Light and Shade
and Poems of Life and Form is that Poems of Life and Form has
hardly any dedications or quotes above the poems. Although, as a result, there are no
dedications to Florence’s husband, his presence - alive and later dead - is
marked in many of the poems, in jokes, and in poems on love and on loneliness.
It is so sad that the only review I could find of Florence’s Poems of
Life and Form was a sneering one by the young Australian poet James
Griffyth Fairfax, in Poetry Review.
I think Florence’s publisher, Methuen, made a mistake sending the Poetry
Review a copy. The magazine was a
new one, still on its first volume and anxious to make a name for itself. Its editor, Harold Munro, made no bones about
his intention to wage “a just and righteous war against formalism...and all
kinds of false traditionalism”. Poems
of Life and Form might have been put together to encompass all that Munro
was against, though that does not excuse Fairfax’s description of Florence’s
volume as containing “no more poetry than a Bradshaw’s Railway Guide”.
Munro wanted Poetry Review to be in the vanguard: in the same
issue as the review of Florence’s book, Munro published a set of poems by
Rupert Brooke including The Old Vicarage Grantchester; and announced his
intention of reviewing Aleister Crowley’s The Winged Beetle when the
magazine had room. Modernism was on its
way, and even to me, Florence’s poems did look dated - not so much in their
form but in their use of language. But
it’s up to the poet to decide how she wants to write poetry; and if she doesn’t
want to follow fashion why should she?
After a review like J G Fairfax’s Florence couldn’t be blamed for never
publishing anything again; and she did only publish one more small volume.
THE LIVING WAY
This is a tiny volume, as it had to be, being published in 1918 with
paper in short supply. Once again,
Florence had been asked to contribute some poems to raise money for
charity. This time, the charity was the
Sacramental Society of Inner Light.
Florence’s set of seven poems, all written with the same rhyming scheme,
either show her returning to her high church roots with a vengeance, or were
written many years before she allowed them to be printed. The seven are meditations on the high church
sacraments: baptism; confirmation; the eucharist; penance; orders (that is, men
in holy orders); matrimony; and unction (which Roger tells me is particularly
high church). The language Florence uses
is old-fashioned - she was probably consciously imitating the Book of Common
Prayer and the King James Bible.
Between 1918 and her death in 1936, Florence published nothing more.
I’ll end by printing a couple of extracts from Poems of Life and Form.
Firstly, a poem about trying to write a poem:
A rondelet!
How shall I build, in
form and tune,
A Rondelet?
I’faith, I very much
regret,
I cannot lop, and trim,
and prune
My words, so that I can
commune
A Rondelet.
Secondly a set of three rondelets, headed “Song passes not away”:
Had I but wings,
Soon I would soar, and
take my flight,
Had I but wings,
To realms wherein the
glad lark sings,
Thence I would rise,
far out of sight,
Into the pure, etheric
Light,
Had I but
wings.
Oh, give me rest,
Morpheus, thou
bounteous god of sleep,
Oh, give me rest;
Take me to regions,
fair and blest,
There may I lift the
Veil, and peep
Into the vast and
mystic Deep,
Oh, give me
rest.
Take thou my heart,
I give it utterly to
thee,
Take thou my heart;
My soul is thine, where’er
thou art,
And what I find to love
in thee,
That shall I love
eternally,
Take thou
my heart.
And the last poem in the book, a quatrain, expressing some rather
un-Christian beliefs:
I am a fighter,
battling for the Right,
I love our Master, and
His striving Men;
When death shall call
me unto Heaven’s Light,
If God so wills - I
would return again.
TWO WOMEN POETS FLORENCE KNEW
Louisa Sarah Bevington
Florence’s poem “To L.S.B.” begins “Sweet eyes! Which gaze in mine with
tender glow”. The whole poem is addressed
to a special ‘other’ and there actually isn’t anything in it that indicates the
‘other’ was a woman, it could have been a man.
However, such strong emotions expressed for a woman friend were not
unusual in Victorian England and I’m assuming that Florence’s poem is
addressing its dedicatee personally; and that she knows her personally, she
hasn’t just read Bevington’s work.
On the face of it, it wasn’t an obvious friendship and I can’t think how
they met unless one of the two - most likely Florence as Louisa Sarah’s work
was published first - wrote to the other in praise of her work. Louisa Sarah was several years older than
Florence and they came from very different backgrounds. Louisa Sarah was the eldest of the eight
children of Alexander and Louisa Bevington, Quakers who lived in
Battersea. No high church upbringing in
a remote colony there, quite the reverse - Louisa Sarah’s father encouraged her
to study science, which led to her meeting Herbert Spencer, inventor of ‘social
Darwinism’. In 1881 at Spencer’s
request, Louisa Sarah published an article in the Fortnightly Review
defending science against critics who accused it of lacking any moral
principles.
Louisa Sarah’s first volume of poetry, Key Notes, was published
in 1876 under the pseudonym Arbor Leigh, a clear reference to Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Barrett
Browning doesn’t seem to have been a favourite of Florence’s; I also wonder
what she made of the article in Fortnightly Review if she read it and
knew that Louisa Sarah had written it.
However, despite these differences in background and outlook, poetry
enabled Florence and Louisa Sarah to became friendly. I think their friendship
was in the late 1870s and/or early 1880s, while Louisa Sarah was writing some
of the poems that were published in 1882 in her Poems, Lyrics and Sonnets,
and Florence was getting married and perhaps trying her own hand at
poetry.
In 1883, however, the friendship was interrupted if not ended when
Louisa Sarah went to Germany to study, a decision that divided her life starkly
into two phases. She met and married the
artist Ignatz Felix Guggenberger and lived in Munich for some years; but the
marriage failed and she returned to London on her own, in the early 1890s, immediately
immersing herself in anarchist politics.
She joined the Autonomie Club whose female members wore short skirts and
even cut their hair. She translated
Louise Michel’s Commune de Paris into English. She still wrote poetry,
but now she focused on human suffering and social issues. She knew Peter Kropotkin and his wife; and
knew of the French revolutionary Bourdin, who killed himself while trying to
blow up Greenwich Observatory. When she
died in 1895 obituaries were published in the anarchist journals Liberty
and The Torch of Anarchy.
Further from lyrics and sonnets Louisa Sarah Guggenberger could hardly
have gone, and it boggles my mind that she and Florence ffoulkes - devout and
devoted wife of a high church clergyman living in the suburbs of Nottingham -
could have anything to say to each other any more. However, they may have kept in touch in the
1880s and 1890s.
Margaret Louisa Woods née Bradley
Margaret Bradley and Florence Jeffreys met at school. I don’t know how long their friendship
lasted. In some ways their lives after
school were similar: they were poets; they were high church Anglicans who
married clergymen. But in other ways,
they were very different.
Margaret Woods (1855-1945) was from a privileged - though not
necessarily wealthy - family. Her
father, Rev George Granville Bradley was a teacher at Rugby school when she was
born; he went on to be headmaster of Marlborough School; and principal of
University College Oxford; before ending his working life by being appointed Dean
of Westminster in time to be in charge of the funerals of Gladstone and Darwin
and the coronation of Edward VII. I’ve
said already that the Bradleys knew Tennyson; but they also knew Matthew
Arnold, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll... They moved in the kinds of circles Florence
could only read about.
Virtually all Margaret’s siblings became writers though Margaret was the
most prolific and the best-known of them.
In 1879, Margaret married Rev Henry George Wood of Trinity College
Oxford. For the next 18 years she lived
in Oxford while her husband’s academic career prospered. Margaret’s first published work was a
poem. It appeared in 1881 in a volume
collected and printed by a family friend.
She continued to publish poetry but also wrote several novels, children’s
stories, a verse-play and articles.
Margaret’s views may give a clue as to Florence’s attitude to the some
of the big socio-political questions of her day - attitudes which only appear
in one of Florence’s poems. People on
the high church end of the Church of England spectrum tended to be conservative
and Margaret was no exception - Mrs Humphrey Ward was a close friend of
hers. Though Margaret didn’t campaign
actively against votes for women like Mrs Ward did, her 1907 novel The Invader
took the view that the intellectual demands of an undergraduate course were
beyond a woman’s capabilities and could lead to women graduates neglecting
their duties as wives and mothers, and even to sexual immorality. Margaret’s heroine used hypnotism to help her
cope with her course work and found herself overtaken by an alternative
personality who demanded sexual freedom - leading in due course to marital
breakdown, remorse, suicide of the heroine and all the other things you would
expect in a story by someone watching with disapproval as women demanded equal
rights. 1907 seems very late to be
making these arguments but Margaret’s opinions were still widely held
(especially amongst men, of course) and perhaps Florence agreed with them. Margaret’s use of hypnotism as a feature of
her plot is interesting - perhaps she had discussed altered mental states with
Florence though she was never a member of the Theosophical Society or the
Golden Dawn.
In 1913, Margaret was elected a member of the Royal Society of
Literature, a rare honour for a woman and perhaps some kind of establishment
stamp of approval for her conservative views.
But those views caused her work to cease to be read even during her own
lifetime and I certainly had never heard of her before I started to research
Florence’s dedications in her Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade.
SOURCES FOR THIS FILE
British Library. Though one book
of poems published by Florence is missing and the four items that the BL does
have are not catalogued consistently.
The British Library has:
1887 Short Poems in Sunlight and Shade. London: Field and Tuer.
An edition of this was
also published in New York by Scribner and Welford.
?1890 Sweet eyes, a song. Florence supplies the words. The music is by Mary Augusta C Salmond
1912 Poems of Life and Form. London: Methuen and Co. This one is catalogued under the name “L
ffoulkes”.
1918 The Living Way. A Set of Verses on the Sacraments. London: C M Dobson
Late Victorian Poetry 1880-99: An Annotated Biobibliography by Catherine W
Reilly. Mansell Publishing Ltd 1994:
p165. It’s a companion volume to Reilly’s earlier work which covers
mid-Victorian poetry and is too early for Florence.
The all-important book that I used to find out more about the kind of
poems Florence chose to write: The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary
by Frances Stillman. Published Thames
and Hudson Ltd originally 1966: p27, pp51-67.
My friend Helen Ash lent me her 1996 edition.
SHORT POEMS IN SUNLIGHT AND SHADE
Review: Cambridge Review vol VIII Supplement dated 20 June 1887
pcxiv. The other reviews are quotes, in Poems
of Life and Form on an unnumbered page at the end of the book.
The TENNYSON quotes:
Via archive.org to the full text of In Memoriam with analysis and
notes by H M Percival. London: Macmillan and Co 1907; the web copy is now in
University of Toronto.
The full text of the Miller’s Tale, with some notes, can be seen on
ebook, Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson at www.gutenborg.org/files/8601/8601-h/8601-h.htm#section39.
Tennyson’s Nothing Will Die can be seen at website poetry.rapgenius.com
which also prints other early works.
Florence’s quote from the Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament is
often printed without the rest of the poem eg in Love Songs from Tennyson
selected by Edith Harris. New York and
Chicago: Rand McNally and Co 1907 p93. I
saw the Library of Congress copy online via archive.org.
The full text of Shelley’s To— is at www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174412.
For further information on Jessie Fothergill, see ODNB volume 20
p533.
Hamilton Drummond is listed in Late
Victorian Poetry 1880-1899: An Annotated Biobibliography by Catherine W
Reilly. Mansell Publishing Ltd 1994
p146. Florence must be quoting Sir
Hildebrand and Other Poems published Dublin by Hodges Figgis and Co
1882. Drummond’s only other volume of
poetry was published in 1893.
The Wordsworth quote: see a complete set of poems by Wordsworth at www.bartleby.com,
For the full text of Myers’ St Paul, see www.sermonindex.net.
Myers is also in Late Victorian Poetry 1880-1899: An Annotated
Biobibliography by Catherine W Reilly.
Mansell Publishing Ltd 1994 p344.
The quote from the Proceedings of the Literary and Philosophical
Society of Liverpool is from volume 31.
Some further information on the Society is at www.scholarly-societies.org website sponsored
by University of Waterloo Library.
The full text of Christina Rossetti’s poem called Spring can be see
at
www.gutenborg.org/files/19188/19188-h/19188-h.htm#p_34A.
Via google to The Works of George Herbert p4.
For information on Walter Herries Pollock and on Alfred de Musset, see
wikipedia.
Florence’s Gold Must Be Tried By Fire is from 1 Peter 1:7. I found it at www.biblestudytools.com.
SWEET EYES
The British Library catalogue gives 1890 as the date of publication of
Salmond’s song, but with a query so it might be a year or so either side. London: W Morley and Co.
More information on Mary Augusta Salmond:
Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry volume 3 Burke,
1937 edition p1975
Medical Times and Gazette volume 2 1878 p366 a marriage notice for Mary
Augusta’s sister Geraldine says their father was “of Lincoln’s Inn”.
Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal: The Clarence Volume by Melville Henry
Massue Marquis de Ruvigny et Raineval p187 entry for Walter Salmond.
Whitaker’s Peerage, Baronetage etc 1925 edition p726 says that
Mary Augusta Compton Salmond had been awarded an OBE.
QUESTIONS
Lucifer: A Theosophical Magazine Volume 1 number 6 issue of 15
February 1888, p485.
TO THE ARABS. ALLAH’S MESSAGE
The reference I found was in Poems of Life and Form unnumbered
page at the end.
Via the web I found it mentioned in The Athenaeum issues
p4366-4392 1911 p489 in a list of recently published poetry and drama. Florence ffoulkes’ friend, GD member Hugh
Elliot, was a member of the Athenaeum Club and grandson of one of its founders:
I expect he persuaded the Club’s magazine to take the advert for Florence’s
pamphlet.
POEMS OF LIFE AND FORM
Poems of Life and Form with Florence’s name given as L F Wynne ffoulkes
possibly in an attempt to hide her gender.
Methuen and Co Ltd 1912. It’s
dedicated to HRH Princess Frederica of Hanover “who has written with generous
favour of my verses”.
For Princess Frederica of Hanover, see wikipedia.
The Poetry Review volume 1 number XI November 1912. Published London: St Catherine Press Strand:
p496; p504-09; p514.
There are biographical notes on James Griffyth Fairfax in The
Bibliography of Australian Literature compilers John Arnold, John A Hay,
Sally Batten. Published Kew Victoria:
Australian Scholarly Publications 2001-08.
Volume 1 p4
THE LIVING WAY
The Living Way (A Set of Verses on the Sacraments) printed by C
Maurice Dobson of 146 Kensington High St.
There’s no date anywhere in the booklet and even the British Library
stamp doesn’t have a date on it, though the booklet is listed in the catalogue
as having been published in 1918. The
booklet has no introduction or preface.
LOUISA SARAH BEVINGTON see ODNB volume 5 p613.
MARGARET LOUISA BRADLEY WOODS
I based my piece of Margaret Woods on the article about her life and
work by Martha W Vogeler in the Dictionary of Literary Biography volume
240: Late 19th and Early 20th Century British Women
Poets. Editor William B Thesing of the
University of South Carolina. Farmingon
Mills MI: Gale Group 2001. In her lifetime Margaret was a far better-known
figure than her husband.
George Granville Bradley 1821-1903 is in ODNB and you can read
his entry online.
Julia Margaret Cameron: A Critical Biography by Colin Ford 2003 p62.
Both Margaret and her husband have letters in Selected Letters of
Robert Bridges by Robert Seymour Bridges, Lionel Muirhead and Donald Elwin,
published Stanford University 1984.
There are some brief biographical notes on p1019.
Copyright SALLY DAVIS
27 December 2013
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