L. S. Bevington (1845–1895)

Louisa Sarah (L.S.)

Bevington was born in Battersea, now a district of south London, England, the eldest of eight children in a Quaker family. Her father was a gentleman, and sent her to school in Cheltenham. She began to write poetry at an early age, and probably made her literary debut with two sonnets published in the Friends' Quarterly Examiner in 1871. Her first collection of poems, Key Notes, was published in 1876, under the pseudonym Arbor Leigh. A second volume, Key-Notes: 1879, appeared under the name L.S. Bevington. That same year, she published her best-known essay, "Modern Atheism and Mr. Mallock," published in two parts in Nineteenth Century. Her early work was naturalistic and contained Christian themes. In 1883, she traveled to Germany, where she met and married Ignatz Guggenberger, a Munich artist. The marriage ended in 1890, when she returned to Britain and restarted her writing career. In London, she came to know many anarchists and gained a reputation as an anarchist poet and activist for a better society free from the evils of the late Victorian period. She wrote numerous articles and poems for the newspaper Liberty, edited by James Tochatti, a Scottish anarchist and tailor. She also contributed to The Torch, edited by Helen and Olivia Rossetti, nieces of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She wrote an Anarchist Manifesto distributed in 1895 and translated an essay on the Paris Commune by her friend Louise Michel. She died in 1895 at age 50 after a long illness involving heart disease and dropsy. The Collected Essays of L.S. Bevington was reprinted in 2010.