ninme

Telegraph - Coleridge’s daughter hid her poetic passions

A British academic has discovered 120 unknown poems by Sara Coleridge at a university in Texas which, he says, rank her as a significant poet.

Though Dr Peter Swaab does not make extravagent claims for the Lake Poet’s daughter – he ranks her as “an important minor poet” – he says that the astonishing discovery casts remarkable light on the struggles of an intellectual woman constrained by Victorian mores.

In the hoard, Dr Swaab has discovered barely-disguised love poems written by Sara to an Irish poet and, most poignantly, a three-verse poem written in 1852 about her fight against breast cancer which was apparently dictated to her daughter from her sick bed. Six weeks later she was dead.

It interests me, in these cases before modern medicine, reading of women with breast cancer. Amy Robsart, Dudley’s unfortunate wife, is thought now to have had it, Louis XIV’s mother had it. Yet it would seem to me these days that it is only detectable using an x-ray machine for a mammogram, or else detecting spots in the bone mass, as always seems to happen to completely unsuspecting guest stars on ER.