Louise Imogen Guiney


Louise Imogen Guiney was an American poet, essayist and editor, born in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Biography

The daughter of Gen. Patrick R. Guiney, an Irish-born American Civil War officer and lawyer, and Jeannette Margaret Doyle, she was raised as a Christian and educated at the Notre Dame convent school in Boston and at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Providence, Rhode Island, from which she graduated in 1879.
Over the next 20 years, she worked at various jobs, including serving as a postmistress and working in the field of cataloging at the Boston Public Library. She was a member of several literary and social clubs, and according to her friend Ralph Adams Cram was "the most vital and creative personal influence" on their circle of writers and artists in Boston.

In 1901, Guiney moved to Oxford, England, to focus on her poetry and essay writing. She gave a crucifix sculpture to the church of St Mary and St Nicholas, Littlemore, to mark the centenary of Cardinal Newman's birth in 1901.
She soon began to suffer from illness and was no longer able to write poetry. She was a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's Magazine, McClure's, Blackwood's Magazine, Dublin Review, The Catholic World, and the Catholic Encyclopedia.
With Gwenllian Morgan, Guiney prepared materials for an edition and biography of the seventeenth-century Welsh poet Henry Vaughan. Neither Guiney nor Morgan lived to complete the project, however, and their research was used by F. E. Hutchinson for his 1947 biography Henry Vaughan.

Guiney died of a stroke near Gloucestershire, England, at age 59, leaving much of her work unfinished.