Louise Imogen Guiney

Guiney, Louise Imogen (7 Jan. 1861-2 Nov. 1920), poet and scholar, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, 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.

While still in adolescence Guiney settled on a literary career. Her early poems were published by John Boyle O'Reilly, editor of the Roman Catholic periodical the Boston Pilot, and many of these reappeared in her first volume of poetry, Songs at the Start (1884). She followed with a volume of essays, Goose-quill Papers (1885), and a second volume of poetry, The White Sail and Other Poems (1887). The fairy tales she wrote for Wide Awake, a children's magazine, were collected in Brownies and Bogles (1888).

By 1887 Guiney had won the friendship of Boston literary figures such as Annie Fields, wife of the publisher James T. Fields, the writer Sarah Orne Jewett, the patron Louise Chandler Moulton, and the genre writer Alice Brown. The essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., punning on her name, called her his "little golden guinea." She also associated herself with Boston's artistic bohemia, a younger group of artists and writers who were aesthetically innovative and sexually ambivalent. Among this group were the architect Ralph Adams Cram and the photographer and publisher Fred Holland Day. Vigorous and athletic--she sometimes preferred men's clothing--Guiney was, according to Cram, "the most vital and creative influence in the lives of all of us" (My Life in Architecture [1936], p. 30).

In 1889 Guiney traveled to London with her mother and stayed two years. Her friend Day arrived and joined her in collecting Keats memorabilia. Alice Brown also visited and edited, with Guiney, a handbook for women, A Summer in England (1891). There has been speculation that Guiney was involved romantically with Brown or Day, or both.

After her return to America, Guiney completed work on her best collection of poetry, A Roadside Harp (1893). Small in scope, the volume comprised a variety of styles: chivalric or medieval-style poems; fifteen "Alexandriana" based on classical forms; and a dozen sonnets on contemporary London. Although the work displayed technical mastery, critics--whose acumen Guiney compared to that of pelicans--complained of the density and difficulty of her phrasing. Van Wyck Brooks found her poetry, with exceptions, to be "ventriloquistic and intensely bookish" (New England: Indian Summer [1940], p. 451) but admired her later essays.

Guiney's career as a poet slowed as her financial resources dwindled and she was forced to work. In 1894 she became postmaster at Auburndale, the small town outside Boston where she and her mother lived. Inhabitants she identified as "bigots of small intellectual calibre" boycotted the post office to protest being served by a Roman Catholic. Her friends came to her rescue by traveling to Auburndale to buy stamps. She found the postal work too distracting for producing poetry, but she continued to write prose and to edit or translate the work of other writers. She had already completed Monsieur Henri (1892), a romantic biography of a French counterrevolutionary, and in 1894 she brought out a book of deft character sketches, A Little English Gallery; among those portrayed was one of her models, the essayist William Hazlitt. Guiney's only book of fiction, Lovers' Saint Ruth's and Three Other Tales, appeared in 1895. In 1897 she completed Patrins (a word meaning gypsy trails), a well-received book of essays that included a lighthearted defense of Charles II of England. She resigned from the post office after a serious illness in 1897. Later she accepted an appointment as a cataloger at the Boston Public Library and worked there for nearly two years.

In 1901 Guiney moved to England and made Oxford her home for the rest of her life. She never, however, gave up her American citizenship. In England, as one of her biographers Henry G. Fairbanks has observed, her work became religious and increasingly Catholic in focus (p. 199). She edited works by such largely forgotten seventeenth-century Catholic literary figures as Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips, and Hurrell Froude. Eventually, she came to concentrate on the generation of English recusant Catholic poets--those who declined to attend the Church of England--and worked on a collection of their work until her death. Although she continued to write general-interest articles for English and American magazines, her concentration on the obscure inevitably subverted any hopes she had of widespread recognition. Not even the appearance of Happy Ending: Collected Lyrics (1908), reviewed enthusiastically in America, brought her celebrity in England.

Guiney visited the United States for the last time when she returned late in 1909 to nurse her dying mother. After returning to England her income dwindled to the point that she eventually had to give up her house in Oxford and move to progressively smaller quarters. In 1917 she suffered a stroke, which curtailed her work. She died at the Cotswolds village of Chipping Camden.

Some of Guiney's most substantial work appeared after her death. Recusant Poets, its editing completed by others, was published in New York and London in 1938 and 1939. An enlarged edition of Happy Ending was published in 1927. Her cousin, Grace Guiney, collected two substantial volumes of her letters (1926), which reveal, as much as does her poetry, the spirit and wit of the woman who has been called "the lost lady of American letters." Although she has not been considered a major poet, cultural historians have shown continuing interest in her role in Boston's literary-artistic ferment of the 1890s and as one of the first Catholic writers to gain recognition in Protestant New England.

Bibliography

The Guiney Room in Dinand Library, Holy Cross College, Worcester, Mass., has substantial holdings of Guiney's letters, first editions, and memorabilia. The Library of Congress has approximately 1,000 letters centering on her correspondence with Fred Holland Day; the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., has a smaller collection. Guiney's other poetical works include Nine Sonnets Written at Oxford (1895), England and Yesterday (1898), and The Martyr's Idyl and Shorter Poems (1900). Her prose includes "Martha Hilton," in Three Heroines of New England Romance (1894), Robert Emmet (1904), and Blessed Edmund Campion (1914). Letters of Louise Imogen Guiney, ed. Grace Guiney (2 vols., 1926), is the most substantial published autobiographical material. Biographies of Guiney include Alice Brown, Louise Imogen Guiney (1921); Eva Mabel Tenison, Louise Imogen Guiney (1923); Mary Adorita Hart, Soul Ordained to Fail (1962); and Henry G. Fairbanks, Louise Imogen Guiney: Laureate of the Lost (1972) and Louise Imogen Guiney (1973). Discussion of Guiney and her associates appears in Hyder Edward Rollins, Keats and the Bostonians (1951); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace (1981); Stephen Maxfield Parrish, Currents of the Nineties in Boston and London (1987); and Douglas Shand-Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram, vol. 1: Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900 (1995). A perceptive appreciation of her work is Daniel J. Berrigan, S.J., "Forgotten Splendor," America, 4 Mar. 1944, pp. 605-6. A brief notice of her death is in the New York Times, 4 Nov. 1920.

James Boylan

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