Annie Matheson wrote four volumes of well-received meditative and lyric poetry that appeared in the 1890s, two collections of essays and poems published in 1909 and 1912, and a final retrospective collection of poetry in 1918. She also contributed many essays to contemporary periodicals, including The Athenaeum, Pall Mall Gazette, Macmillan's Magazine, and The Guardian, and published several biographies for young people. An egalitarian feminist, Matheson wrote poetry in which she explored ecumenical approaches to ethics and spiritual experience, and with her prose she supported reformist schemes for the alleviation of poverty and social injustice.

The frontispieces to Selected Poems Old and New (1899) and Roses, Loaves, and Old Rhymes (1911) show a slender woman wearing a jacket and cropped hair, but relatively little is known about Matheson's life. She was born in 1853 in Blackheath (now in southeast London), the daughter of Elizabeth Cripps and the Reverend James Matheson, a Congregationalist minister, and...