'Lesbia Harford (1891–1927) has occupied only a small place in Australian literary history – for decades, she was utterly forgotten – yet when she died, at thirty-six, she left behind three notebooks containing some of the finest lyric poems ever written in Australia.
Harford’s writing looks both forwards and backwards, blending Pre-Raphaelite influences and plain-speaking with unusual subtlety. At the same time, Harford was bound inextricably to the period in which she lived: war in Europe, changing attitudes to religion, the suffrage movement, and widespread social upheaval all helped make her one of the first truly modern, urban figures in Australian poetry.' (Publisher's blurb)
Epigraph:
– such a price
The Gods exact for song'
To become what we sing.
–Matthew Arnold
'When Lesbia Harford died in 1927, she left behind three thick and neatly-lined exercise books full of handwritten poetry. These, now housed in the Mitchell Library, provided the basis for Nettie Palmer’s The Poems of Lesbia Harford (1941) and, in 1985, Drusilla Modjeska and Marjorie Pizer’s expanded collection, published under the same title.' (Introduction)
