Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By Critical and Biographical Essay by Richard GarnettSarah Coleridge (18021850)
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After George Eliot’s, we should pronounce Sara Coleridge’s the most powerful female mind which has as yet addressed itself to English literature. While deficient in no feminine grace, she is intellectually distinguished by a quality for which we can find no better name than manliness. She displays the strongest, massiest common sense, goes direct to the root of a matter, sweeps antagonism from her path in a twinkling, and exhibits a refreshing liberality, despite a burden of hereditary and conventional prejudice. Circumstances forced her learning and her reasoning faculty into prominence, her pious labours as her father’s editor and annotator leaving her but little opportunity for the exercise of the imaginative gift which she had equally inherited from him. “Phantasmion,” though too unsubstantial a work to create a permanent impression, shows that she possessed this endowment in rich measure, and the little lyrics scattered through its pages confer upon her a secure though a modest place among English poetesses.