Legends & Lyrics: First Series

Adelaide Anne Procter was born at 25 Bedford Square in Bloomsbury, on October 30th, 1825. An early voracious reader she began her literary career as a teenager; her poems were primarily published in Charles Dickens's periodicals Household Words and All the Year Round and later published in book form.

Her charity work and her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1851 seems to have been a strong influence on her poetry and her desire to help the homeless and unemployed women as well as work with feminist groups and various journals. Adelaide was a favourite poet of Queen Victoria and fellow poet Coventry Patmore called her “the most popular poet of the day after Alfred Lord Tennyson”. Many of her poems were set to music and published in England, Germany and the United States.

Adelaide never married and this has given rise to questions about her sexuality. Her poems do reveal how Victorian women expressed repressed feelings but for many years now her work has to been given the attention it really deserves. Here we publish volume 2 of her poems so her work can now be seen for the great talent that she is.

Adelaide Anne Proctor died on February 2nd 1864, from tuberculosis, at the age of only 38.