Anna Wickham - Career and Strifes

Career and Strifes

In her autobiographical writing she represented this occurrence as related to her husband's hostility to her writing of poetry. It followed a violent quarrel. Given the complexities of her emotional life at the time, post-natal (with two miscarriages) and in relation to parental conflicts, there is reasonable doubt whether that was the single factor.

Her first collection, Songs by John Oland was published in 1911. Around then, or shortly after, she met Harold Monro at his Poetry Bookshop. He encouraged her, and she published a second collection in 1915. This was the effective start of thirty years in which she mixed with literati in London (and later Paris). She carried on a bohemian, later Fitzrovian existence socially, in parallel with a home life.

During World War I Patrick Hepburn spent time away from home, joining the RNAS. Anna struck up an acquaintance at this time with D. H. Lawrence and Frieda. She also knew H. D., with whom she'd had a brief bisexual affair, although that was one of several contacts which apparently failed in sympathy.

Her third son Richard died of scarlet fever aged four. She spent a period in 1921/1922 in Paris, after his death, to recuperate. There she developed a passion for Natalie Barney. It was not returned in the same way, but they sustained a correspondence (later published as Postcards and Poems). She met some leading Paris figures in anglophone modernism of the time.

Her marriage was in crisis in 1926, and she separated from Patrick until 1928. He died in an accident on holiday, in 1929.

During the 1930s she was well known in literary London, and wrote a great deal of poetry (much of which was later lost in war damage); but found it harder to get published. She did have support from the somewhat louche quarter of John Gawsworth, who put out a Richards Press collection of her work in 1936. An extended autobiographical essay Prelude to a Spring Clean dates from 1935. That was the year in which she supported the just-married Dylan Thomas and Caitlin, and then quarrelled with them.

Her death was by suicide in the very hard winter of 1947, foreshadowed a dozen years before in her writing.