Sara Coleridge (1802–1852)

Sara Coleridge was born in Keswick, England, the heart of the Lake District, the only daughter of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his wife Sarah Fricker Coleridge, also a writer. She grew up in an extended family that included her uncle, Robert Southey, and her aunt Mary Fricker Lovell and her husband, the poet Robert Lovell. The Wordsworths were her neighbors. She was educated at home by various relatives, especially her mother and Southey. Her first published work was a translation she did for him while he was writing the Tale of Paraguay. In 1829, she married her cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge, with whom she had several children. She wrote Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children (1834) and Phantasmion (1837), one of the first fantasy novels in England, which proved very popular. After her husband died in 1843, she took up his unfinished task of editing her father’s works, and also made several important independent contributions to Coleridge studies. Besides children’s stories and verses, she also wrote poetry for adults and essays on religion, politics and psychology.