Louise Imogen Guiney: Poet, Critic, Biographer

Today marks the birth of Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), a Massachusetts-born essayist, poet, and literary scholar who spent much of her life in England. The daughter of a Civil War general, she worked as a postmistress and librarian in New england while pursuing her writing. In 1901, she moved to England permanently. In addition to her essays and poems, she wrote biographies of Irish nationalist Robert Emmett and Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion. In later years she wrote critical and biographical studies of English Catholic writers. In 1920, she died of a stroke in Gloucestershire. In 1939 her anthology of Catholic poets was published posthumously. Her father’s letters, published by Fordham University Press, are worth reading too.