Anna Wickham, pseudonym of Edith Alice Mary Hepburn, née Harper Biography

British poet, born in Wimbledon; she grew up in Australia, where she attended schools in Brisbane and Sydney. Having returned to London in 1905, she trained as an opera singer before marriage and motherhood precluded her progress in this field. Songs (1911), her first collection of verse, appeared under the pseudonym ‘John Oland’. Among her subsequent volumes, The Contemplative Quarry (1915) and The Little Old House (1921) were published by Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop; Thirty-Six New Poems (1936) was the last of her works to appear before her suicide in 1947. Her poetry is notable for its accomplished flexibility in the use of rhyming verse forms and for the epigrammatic energies of her feminist critiques of social and marital convention. D. H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, and Malcolm Lowry were among her friends. In addition to the poems and essays it collects, The Writings of Anna Wickham (edited by R. D. Smith, 1984) contains a lengthy fragment of autobiography.