Louisa Baldwin was born one of the remarkable MacDonald sisters, daughters of a Scottish Methodist minister and his wife. Her sisters Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, and Agnes Poynter all became prominent either by marriage or as the mothers of influential men. In 1866, Louisa married Alfred Baldwin, a businessman and Member of Parliament; their son Stanley Baldwin became a three-term British prime minister. Louisa suffered from a mysterious debilitating illness for most of her adult life. She turned to writing as an outlet, and produced half a dozen novels, children's stories, supernatural fiction, and poetry. Her ghost stories, which were originally published in periodicals such as The Argosy, were collected in The Shadow on the Blind (1895). See her biography in A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin by Judith Flanders (2001).
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