Over the next 20 years, she worked at various jobs, including serving as a postmistress and working in the field of cataloging at the
Boston Public Library. She was a member of several literary and social clubs, and according to her friend
Ralph Adams Cram was "the most vital and creative personal influence" on their circle of writers and artists in Boston[3] (see
Visionists).
In 1901, Guiney moved to
Oxford, England, to focus on her poetry and essay writing. She donated a crucifix sculpture to the church of
St Mary and St Nicholas,
Littlemore, to mark the centenary of
Cardinal Newman's birth in 1901.[4]
With
Gwenllian Morgan, Guiney prepared materials for an edition and biography of the seventeenth-century
Anglo-WelshMetaphysical poetHenry Vaughan. Neither Guiney nor Morgan lived to complete the project, however, but their research was used by F. E. Hutchinson for his 1947 biography Henry Vaughan.[6]
Death and legacy
Guiney died of a stroke near
Gloucestershire, England, at age 59, leaving much of her work unfinished.[7] Her life and works caught the attention of the historian and writer
Eva Tenison who unusually published books about her under her own name. In the year after she died Tenison published, Louise Imogen Guiney; an Appreciation.[8] In 1923 she published Louise Imogen Guiney: Her Life and Works, 1861-1920[9] and A Bibliography of Louise Imogen Guiney, 1861-1920.[10] Tenison also published, The Recusant Poets: An Unpublished Work of Louise Imogen Guiney and Fr. Geoffrey Bliss, S.J.[11]
In 1926, Guiney's sister Grace published a posthumous letter collection.[12]
Bibliography
Songs at the Start (1884, poetry)
Goose-Quill Papers (1885, essays)
The White Sail and Other Poems (1887, poetry)
Brownies and Bogles (1888, poetry)
Monsieur Henri: A Foot-Note to French History (1892, essays)
A Roadside Harp (1893, poetry)
A Little English Gallery (1895, essays)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1895, biography, with Alice Brown)
Lovers' Saint Ruth's and Three Other Tales (1895, short stories)
Nine Sonnets Written at Oxford (1895, poetry)
Patrins (1897, essays)
James Clarence Mangan, his Selected Poems: With a Study by the Editor (1897, editor)
England and Yesterday (1898, poetry)
The Martyrs' Idyl and Shorter Poems (1899, poetry)
^Guiney, Louise Imogen (1926). Guiney, Grace Cecily (ed.).
Letters of Louise Imogen Guiney. New York, London: Harper & brothers.
Sources
Fairbanks, Henry G., Louise Imogen Guiney, New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1975.
ISBN978-0805703429.
Reichardt, Mary R. (ed.), Catholic Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, Portsmouth, NH: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2001.
ISBN978-0313311475.
Tenison, E.M., Louise Imogen Guiney,: Her Life And Works, 1861-1920, London: Macmillan, London, 1923. ASIN: B000859GVG 1923.