Anna Wickham : a poet's daring life /

Born Edith Alice Mary Harper, Anna Wickham (1883-1947) was a woman much beyond the common pattern. An English girl raised in Australia, she would return home to become a wife, mother, and acclaimed poet of the Modernist Movement of the 1910s and 1920s. The thread of her life tangles through bouts of matrimonial sparring (she was once institutionalized by her husband) to joyous motherhood, a life of art and scandal, and, finally, suicide. As revealed by Jones (The Poetry and Place of Anna Wickham 1910-30) in this carefully researched work, Wickham ranged far both in literary taste and in the emotions revealed by her writing. Through the years, she associated with a host of international figures: David Garnett (of the early Bloomsbury group), D.H. Lawrence, Harold Monro, Louis Untermeyer, and unconventional American millionairess and open lesbian Natalie Barney. Later, such figures as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Malcolm Lowry crossed paths with her as well. Jones does a fine job not only of disclosing the intimate details of the poet's tragic life but also of interweaving her poems through the narrative and paying special attention to her writing techniques. The result is a thorough biography that nicely complements books on such figures as Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and H.D.-Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.