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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'At the age of ten, Anna Wickham (1883–1947), born Edith Alice Mary Harper, promised her father that she would become a poet. She made the promise in Wickham Terrace in Brisbane, where her family lived for a period after emigrating from London. She later adopted the pseudonym ‘Anna Wickham’ in honour of this moment. Wickham’s life was strikingly transnational. She departed Australia in 1904 to study opera singing in London and Paris, and shared friendships with many prominent writers, including D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Dylan Thomas. Her husband, Patrick Hepburn, opposed her writing. In 1913, he had Wickham incarcerated in an asylum for several months, during which she wrote eighty more poems. By the time of her death by suicide in 1947, Wickham had written over 1,400 poems. Her work suffered some critical neglect in traditional accounts of literary modernism; however, critics are now beginning to recognise her as a significant modernist and feminist poet.' (Introduction)
