Anna Wickham

Anna Wickham was the pseudonym of Edith Alice Mary Harper (1883–1947), 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 DH 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.

Early life

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, poetry (he could recite much of Tennyson and many speeches from Shakespeare by heart) and astronomy. He was one of the founders of the Hampstead Astronomy Society. They had four sons. They lived first in central London, then in family houses in Hampstead: Downshire Hill from 1909, and then from 1919 a house on Parliament Hill which would be her permanent home.

She became involved in the contemporary philanthropic movement concerned with maternal care, at St Pancras Hospital.

Career and strife

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. Some writers of accounts of her life suggest, without any evidence, that her husband was opposed to her poetry but they had met through a shared love of poetry.

She was emotionally volatile and in 1911, during one sustained outburst in the garden of the Hepburn's Downshire Hill villa, when attempts to calm her by both her husband and her mother (who was visiting from Australia) had failed, help was called. Doctors attending thought it best she have a period of rest in a private psychiatric hospital for a period of about six weeks. In her autobiographical writing she represented this occurrence as related to what she imagined to be her husband's hostility to her writing of poetry. Given the complexities of her emotional life at the time, post-natal (with two miscarriages), not naturally suited to motherhood and in relation to parental conflicts, there would have been other factors at play. In those six weeks she wrote some 55 poems.

Shortly after, 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, in parallel with the home life she often felt so hindered by. The home life did not hinder her having affairs with both men and women.

During World War I her patient husband, Patrick Hepburn, served in one of the most dangerous jobs on the Western Front, manning an observation balloon at a great height to report back the disposition of the enemy. These balloons were a major target for enemy fire. This was in the RNAS. During his wartime absence, 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 it ended unhappily for her. Her relations with the novelist Eliot Bliss are said to have been intimate.

Her third son Richard died of scarlet fever aged four. She spent a period in the early 1920s in Paris, after his death, leaving her other children behind, to recuperate. There she developed a passion for Natalie Barney. It was briefly returned in the same way and 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 because of her selfish behaviour and she separated from her husband. He died in an accident on holiday, in 1929.

During the 1930s she was well known in literary London for the literary salon she ran in her basement kitchen, and wrote a great deal of poetry (much of which was later lost in war damage); but found it more difficult to procure publication. She did find support from the somewhat louche quarter of John Gawsworth, who put out a Richards Press collection of her work in 1936. 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 was also well known in the Hampstead area. A tall powerful woman who by then liked beer, she was banned from her local pub for punching the barman in the face when he refused her another drink.

She committed suicide during the winter of 1947, leaving her youngest son to find her body when he returned home on the evening of her suicide.

Works

• Songs of John Oland (1911)
• The Contemplative Quarry (1915)
• The Man With A Hammer (1916)
• The Little Old House 1921
• Anna Wickham: Richards' Shilling Selections from Edwardian Poets (1936, Richards Press)
• Selected Poems (1971)
• The Writings of Anna Wickham: Free Woman and Poet (1984) edited by R. D. Smith, includes "Prelude to a Spring Clean".

References

• A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham (2002) Nelljean McConeghey Rice
• Anna Wickham: A Poet's Daring Life (2003) Jennifer Vaughan Jones
• AustLit Author Entry

External links

• Works by Anna Wickham at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)