Guiney, Louise Imogen, 1861-1920

Mr. Holmes was a editor of the Boston Herald.

Poet, essayist, journalist, and librarian.

Louise Imogen Guiney was an American poet and essayist.

Poet and scholar Louise Imogen Guiney was born in Boston, Massachusetts January 7, 1861, the daughter of Patrick Robert Guiney, a lawyer and Union brigadier general in the Civil War, and Janet M. Doyle. She studied at the Jesuit Elmhurst Convent of the Sacred Heart in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1877, two years before she graduated, her father died from an old war wound. The martial and chivalric strains in her poetry have been attributed to his influence. Guiney settled on a literary career while still in adolescence. Her early poems were published in the Roman Catholic periodical Boston Pilot. In the 1880s she published two books of poetry and a book of fairy tales, and had won the friendship of such Boston literary figures as Annie Fields, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Alice Brown. She associated herself with Boston's artistic bohemia, among them photographer and publisher Fred Holland Day, and sometimes preferred to wear men's clothing. It has been speculated that she was romantically involved with either Brown or Day, or both. Guiney's career as a poet slowed as her financial resources dwindled, and she was forced to work. During the 1890s, she held the job as postmaster at Auburndale, Massachusetts and continued to write and publish. Monsieur Henri, a romantic biography of a French counterrevolutionary, was published in 1892, followed by A Little English Gallery in 1894 and Lovers' Saint Ruth's and Three Other Tales in 1895. Although she resigned from the post office after a serious illness in 1897, she later accepted an appointment as a cataloger at the Boston Public Library and worked there for nearly two years.

Poet, essayist.

Louise Imogen Guiney, American poet and scholar.

Epithet: of Add MS 38906

Catholic poet and essayist.

Poet.

Guiney was born in Boston. Her poems appeared in several periodicals and she also published several books of verse. After 1901 she lived in England.

Poet, essayist, and literary scholar.

Guiney resided in England after 1901.

Poet, essayist, and literary scholar.

Guiney resided in England after 1901.

Biographical Note

Louise Imogen Guiney was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1861, the daughter of General Patrick R. Guiney, an Irish-born American Civil War officer and lawyer. She was educated at Elmhurst Convent school in Providence, Rhode Island, and worked as a postmistress in Auburndale, Mass., and cataloger at the Boston Public Library. In 1884, she published her first book of poems, Songs at the Start, followed in the 1890s by collections of poems and essays entitled A Roadside Harp and Patrins . She edited editions of James Clarence Mangan and of Matthew Arnold, and shared with Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford and Alice Brown the authorship of Three Heroines of English Romance . She moved to England in 1901 and died at Gloucesterhire on November 2, 1920.

Epithet: American author