Sara Coleridge

Sara Coleridge, from A Poet's Children, 1902. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Sara Coleridge
Born	December 23 1802(1802-Template:MONTHNUMBER-23) Keswick, Cumberland, England
Died	May 3 1852(1852-Template:MONTHNUMBER-03) (aged 49) London, England
Occupation	translator
Nationality	English
Spouse(s)	Henry Nelson Coleridge
Children	Herbert Coleridge, Edith Coleridge, Berkeley Coleridge, Florence Coleridge, Bertha Fanny Coleridge
Relative(s)	Samuel Taylor Coleridge (father), Hartley Coleridge (brother), Derwent Coleridge (brother)

Sara Coleridge (23 December 1802 - 3 May 1852) was an English poet, prose author, and translator.

Life

Overview

Coleridge was the 4th child and only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his wife, Sarah (Fricker). She married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge. She translated Dobrizhöffer's Account of the Abipones, and The Joyous and Pleasant History ... of the Chevalier Bayard. Her original works are Pretty Lessons in Verse, etc. (1834), which was very popular, and a fairy tale, Phantasmion. She also edited her father's works, to which she added an essay on Rationalism.

Youth

Coleridge was born at Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumbria. Here, after 1803, the Coleridges, Robert Southey and his wife (Mrs. Coleridge's sister), and Mrs. Lovell (another sister, the widow of Robert Lovell, the Quaker poet), all lived together; but Samuel Coleridge was often away from home; and "Uncle Southey" was a paterfamilias.

The Wordsworths at Grasmere were their neighbors. William Wordsworth, in his poem, The Triad, has left us a description (or poetical glorification, as Sara called it) of the 3 girls: his own daughter Dora, Edith Southey and Sara Coleridge, "the last of the 3, though eldest born."

Greta Hall was Sara Coleridge's home until her marriage; and the little Lake colony seems to have been her only school. Guided by Southey, and with his ample library at her command, she read by herself the chief Greek and Latin classics, and before she was 25 had learnt in addition French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Career

On 1822 she published in 3 volumes a translation of Martin Dobrizhoffer's Latin Account of the Abipones, a performance in S.T. Coleridge's judgment "unsurpassed for pure mother English by anything I have read for a long time." It was undertaken in connection with Southey’s Tale of Paraguay, which had been suggested to him by Dobrizhoffer’s volumes; and Southey alludes to his niece, the translator (canto iii. stanza 16), where he speaks of the pleasure the old missionary would have felt if

“ . . . . he could in Merlin’s glass have seen

By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught.”

In less grandiloquent terms, Charles Lamb, writing about the Tale of Paraguay to Southey in 1825, says, “How she Dobrizhoffered it all out, puzzles my slender Latinity to conjecture.” It was undertaken as a contribution to her brother Derwent's college expenses, but these having been defrayed by his own exertions, the profits were invested for the translator's benefit.

In 1825 her 2nd work appeared, a translation from the medieval French of the “Loyal Serviteur,” The Right Joyous and Pleasant History of the Feats, Jests, and Prowesses of the Chevalier Bayard, the Good Knight without Fear and without Reproach: By the Loyal Servant.

In September 1829 at Crosthwaite church, Keswick, after an engagement of 7 years’ duration, she was married to her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798–1843), younger son of Captain James Coleridge (1760–1836), whose acquaintance she had made on a visit to her father in 1822. He was then a chancery barrister in London. The first eight years of her married life were spent in a little cottage in Hampstead. There four of her children were born, of whom two survived.

In 1834 Mrs Coleridge published her Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children; with some Lessons in Latin in Easy Rhyme. These were originally written for the instruction of her own children, and became very popular. In 1837 the Coleridges moved to Chester Place, Regent’s Park; and in the same year appeared Phantasmion: A fairy tale, Sara Coleridge’s longest original work.

Later life

In 1843 Henry Coleridge died, and his widow continued his task of editing and annotating her father's writings, "expending in this desultory form," says Professor Reed, "an amount of original thought and an affluence of learning which, differently and more prominently presented, would have made her famous." To these she added some compositions of her own, among which are the "Essay on Rationalism, with a special application to the Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration," appended to Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection; a Preface to the Essays on his Own Times, by S. T. Coleridge; and the Introduction to the Biographia Literaria.

The unanimous testimony of her friends represents her as an almost perfect woman, uniting masculine strength of intellect to feminine grace and charm. This favourable judgment is confirmed in both its branches by the correspondence published by her daughter in 1873, though a considerable part of it is occupied with references to contemporary theological controversies. "She was most at home and at ease," says Sir Henry Taylor, "in the region of psychology and abstract thought." Many of her remarks and criticisms nevertheless evince the soundest common sense.

During the last few years of her life Sara Coleridge was a confirmed invalid. In 1850 her always delicate constitution broke down, and she died on 3 May 1852.

Writing

Phantasmion

Coleridge's only original work of importance, the fairy tale Phantasmion, though full of charming fancy, fails as a whole from the characteristic pointed out by Lord Coleridge, its recent editor, "the extent and completeness of its narrative." It is planned on too large a scale, and fatigues with the maze and bustle of its intangible personages.

The diction, however, is a model of vigor and purity, and the lyrics interspersed entitle the writer to a highly respectable rank among English poetesses. The songs in Phantasmion were much admired at the time by Leigh Hunt and other critics. Some of them, such as “Sylvan Stay” and “One Face Alone,” are extremely graceful and musical; and the whole fairy tale is noticeable for the beauty of the story and the richness of its language.

Autobiography

Shortly before Coleridge died she amused herself by writing a little autobiography for her daughter. This, which reaches only to her 9th year, was completed by her daughter, and published in 1873, together with some of her letters, under the title Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge. The letters show a cultured and highly speculative mind. They contain many apt criticisms of known people and books, and are specially interesting for their allusions to Wordsworth and the Lake Poets.

Recognition

2 of her poems, "O sleep, my Babe" and "The Child", were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

Publications

Poetry

• Collected Poems (edited by Peter Swaab). Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2007.

Novel

• Phantasmion: A fairy tale (verse novel). London: William Pickering, 1837; Oxford, UK, & New York: Woodstock Books, 1994
  • also published as Phantasmion: Prince of Palmland. New York: S. Colman, 1839.

Juvenile

• Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children; with some lessons in Latin, in easy rhyme. London: J.W. Parker, 1845.
• January Brings the Snow: A book of months (illustrated by Jenni Oliver). New York: Dial, 1986.
• January Brings the Snow: A seasonal hide-and-seek book (illustrated by Elizabeth Falconer). New York: Orchard, 1989.
• The Months: Fun with friends year round (illustrated by Kathy Weller). Montreal: Lobster Press, 2007.

Edited

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems (edited by Derwent Coleridge & Sara Coleridge). London: Edward Moxon, 1852.

Letters

• Memoir and Letters (edited by Edith Coleridge). London: Henry S. King, 1873; New York: Harper, 1874.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Sara Coleridge - Trees' - poem

See also

• List of British poets

References

KT reads The Months

•  Garnett, Richard (1887) "Coleridge, Sara" in Stephen, Leslie Dictionary of National Biography 11 London: Smith, Elder, p. 317 . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 18, 2017.
•  Garnett, Richard (1911). "Coleridge, Sara". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 681. . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 18, 2017.
• Kathleen Jones, A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets. Virago, 1998.
• Dennis Low, The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets. Ashgate, 2006.
• B.K. Mudge, Sara Coleridge: A Victorian daughter. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.

External links

Poems

• "The Months"
• "The Garden Year" at the Academy of American Poets
• from Phantasmio in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895
• Poem of the week: "Time's Acquittal" at The Guardian
• Sara Coleridge in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900: "O sleep, my Babe", "The Child"
• Sara Coleridge at PoemHunter (5 poems)
• Sara Coleridge at Poetry Nook (181 poems)

Books

• Works of Sara Coleridge at Internet Archive
• Sara Coleridge at Amazon.com

About

• "Coleridge's daughter hid her poetic passions," The Telegraph
• Sara Coleridge in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature.
• "The Poets' Daughters: Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge"
• Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge edited by Edith Coleridge
• A Poet's Children: Hartley and Sara Coleridge by Eleanor Towle]
• The Genealogy of Coleridge Family and Coleridge links
• Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy by Matthew David Surridge. Article about Sara Coleridge and Phantasmion, arguing it is the first fantasy novel set entirely in a Secondary World

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Coleridge, Sara
 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Original article is at: Coleridge, Sara