The two volumes of poetry published by Anna Louisa Walker (later Mrs. Harry Coghill) represent the smaller portion of her literary output, which also includes five "triple-decker" (three-volume) novels, a book of children's plays, a novella, and her edition of her cousin Margaret Oliphant's autobiography and letters. Walker's occasionally sentimental, frequently religious and didactic verse ranks her among the minor English poets, but her contribution to Canada's nascent national literature during the few years she lived in that country gives her poetry some historical importance.

Scholarly consensus puts the date of Walker's birth at around 1836. She was born in Staffordshire to Robert Walker, a civil engineer, and Anna Walker. As a girl Walker moved with her parents and two older sisters, Isabella and Frances, to Canada, where her father had been hired to work on the construction of the Grand Trunk Railway. They lived at first in Pointe...