Queer Places:
68 Parliament Hill, Hampstead, London NW3 2TJ, UK
49 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, London NW3 1NX, UK
51 Willow Rd, Hampstead, London NW3 1TP, UK
Anna Wickham was the
pseudonym
of Edith Alice Mary Harper (May 7, 1883 - April 30, 1947), an English/Australian poet who
was a pioneer of modernist poetry, and one of the most important female poets
writing during the first half of the twentieth century. She was friend to
other important writers of the time, such as D.H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw,
Katherine Mansfield and
Dylan Thomas. She lived a transnational,
unconventional life, moving between Australia, England and France. She is
remembered as a
modernist figure and
feminist writer, although one who did not command sustained critical
attention in her lifetime, although her poetry did earn her a major reputation
at the time of writing and had been frequently anthologised. Her literary
reputation has improved since her death and she is now regarded as an
important early 20th-century woman writer.
She was born in
Wimbledon, London and brought up in Australia in a rather disordered
existence, mostly in
Brisbane
and Sydney.
Her pen-names imply an Australian self-identification: "Wickham" was adopted
after a Brisbane street. She had used "John Oland" for her first collection,
which alludes to the
Jenolan Caves in
New South Wales.
Wickham returned to London in 1904, where she took singing lessons and won
a drama scholarship (at the future
RADA, just founded). She pursued her singing in
Paris in 1905
with
Jean de Reszke, the Polish tenor.
In 1906 she married
Patrick Hepburn, a City of London
solicitor
with interests in
Romanesque architecture, and later
astronomy.
They had four sons. They lived first in central London, then in family houses
in
Hampstead:
49
Downshire Hill from 1909, and then from 1919 a house on
68
Parliament Hill. In 1927 she moved to 51 Willow Road, sharing a flat with a
young novelist, Ruth Brockington.
She became involved in the contemporary philanthropic movement concerned
with maternal care, at
St Pancras Hospital.
Her first collection, Songs by John Oland was published in 1911, and
had a particular focus on the conflict between men and women, depicted in such
poems as 'Song of the Low-Caste Wife', 'Surrender' and 'Divorce'. Other
subjects included the ambition to be a writer, a post-Darwin loss of religious
faith, and motherhood. Her husband was angered at her publishing a book, and
subsequently also captured the interest of one of his friends in his
astronomical circles. He was known to be possessive, and generally
unsupportive of her singing and writing, which may have been a major factor
leading to her breakdown and psychiatric hospitalisation.
She was in a private psychiatric hospital in 1911 for a period of about six
weeks. In her autobiographical writing she represented this occurrence as
related to her husband's hostility to her writing of poetry. It followed a
violent quarrel. Given the complexities of her emotional life at the time,
post-natal (with two miscarriages) and in relation to parental conflicts,
there would have been other factors at play, but this kind of hostility was
not unusual towards pioneering women writers of the time.
Shortly afterwards, she met
Harold Monro at his
Poetry Bookshop. He encouraged her writing, and she published a second
collection in 1915. This was the effective start of thirty years during which
she mixed with
literati in London (and later in Paris). She carried on a
bohemian lifestyle, in parallel with the home life she often felt so
hindered by.
During
World
War I Patrick Hepburn spent time away from home, joining the
RNAS. During this time, Anna struck up a friendship with
D. H. Lawrence and his wife
Frieda. She also knew
H. D., with whom she'd had a brief affair, although that was one of several contacts which
apparently failed in sympathy. Her relations with the novelist
Eliot
Bliss are said to have been intimate.[1]
Her third son Richard died of
scarlet fever aged four. She spent a period in the early 1920s in Paris,
after his death, to recuperate. There she developed a passion for
Natalie Barney. It was not returned in the same way, but they sustained a
correspondence (later published as Postcards and Poems). She met some
leading Paris figures in anglophone modernism of the time.
It is believed that her marriage was in crisis during 1926, and she was
separated from her husband until 1928. He died in an accident, on holiday, in
1929.
During the 1930s she was well known in literary London, and wrote a great
deal of poetry (much of which was later lost in war damage) and much of which
remained unpublished. She did find support from the somewhat louche
John Gawsworth, who in 1936 put out a
Richards Press collection of her work. An extended autobiographical essay
Prelude to a Spring Clean dates from 1935. That was the year in which
she supported the just-married
Dylan Thomas and Caitlin, and then quarrelled with them.
She took her own life
suicide
during the winter of 1947.
My published books:
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Wickham