{\b Mary Elizabeth Coleridge}.

{\b Date of Birth}.: 23 September 1861

{\b Date of Death}.: 25 August 1907

{\b Works}.

English poet, novelist and essayist. Mary Elizabeth Coleridge published 
numerous articles in such journals and reviews as the 'Monthly Packet', the 
'Monthly Review', the 'Guardian', the 'Cornhill Magazine' and, from 1902 
onwards, the 'Times Literary Supplement'. She published the first of her 
novels, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, in 1893. This was followed, three years 
later, by a book of poems entitled Fancy's Following (1896). Both of these 
appeared under the pen-name 'Anodos'. Her second novel, an historical romance 
called The King With Two Faces (1897), appeared under her own name and 
established her reputation. Two more novels - The Fiery Dawn (1901) and The 
Lady on the Drawing Room Floor (1906) - and a biographical work, The Life of 
Holman Hunt (1908), followed. The latter of these, along with a collection of 
her Poems Old and New (1907) were published posthumously, as were the 
collections of prose, stories and essays: Nonsequitur (1900) and Gathered 
Leaves (1910).

{\b Featured Works}.

'Furness Abbey', 'Chillingham', 'Street Lanterns', 'Jealousy', "We Were Not 
Made For Refuges Of Lies", 'High Wind', 'Our Lady', 'Egypt's Might is Tumbled 
Down'.

{\b General Comment}.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, great-great-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was 
educated at home. As the daughter of Arthur Duke Coleridge, a Clerk of the 
Assizes, and Mary Anne Jameson, she was encouraged to write from an early age. 
No doubt taking some inspiration from the family heritage, she was also 
assisted in her endeavours by the poet and friend of her fathers' William 
Jonson Cory, who took a post as her personal tutor. 

As a woman in a predominantly male world of publishing, Mary Elizabeth, 
writing at this time under an assumed name, received the praise of Robert 
Louis Stevenson for her first novel. Perhaps more importantly, she was also 
assisted by another Robert, Robert Bridges, who persuaded Oxford University 
Press to publish a collection of her poems,  Fancy's Following (1896). With 
the pen-name 'Anodos' announcing both her genderless anonymity and evoking the 
Greek 'anodynon' - meaning that which eases pain or soothes anxiety - Mary 
Elizabeth would seem to have inherited something both of her 
great-great-uncle's passion for etymology and his infamous sense of humour. It 
has also been suggested that certain of the themes of her poetry in 
particular, the not un-Coleridgean exploration of dream states  and of 
questions of identity, have had some influence upon later, twentieth century, 
feminist thought. 

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge never married. Alongside her writing career, she also 
worked teaching working women both at a Working Women's College and at her own 
home. She died in Harrogate, Yorkshire, of appendicitis at the age of 45.