As Louisa Sarah Bevington wrote in "My Little Task" (1882), "What, with this fenced human mind, / What can I do to help my kind? / I such a stammerer, they so blind!" Bevington's concern for the individual human rights of her "kind" against the expanding power of British imperialism changed her life dramatically. Far from a "stammerer," she was a poet, essayist, and activist who represented the political as well as the literary scene of the fin de siècle.

She was born on 14 May 1845 to Quaker parents, Alexander Bevington and Louisa De Horne, at St. John's Hill, Battersea, in the county of Surrey. Her father's occupation was described as "gentleman" on her birth certificate; one of his ancestors had been confined in Nottingham Gaol with George Fox, a founder of the Society of Friends. Louisa Bevington was the eldest of eight children, seven of whom were girls. Her...