The daughter of one of Alfred Tennyson's fellow Apostles and Sterling Club intimates, Lucy Knox published two volumes of poems, largely sonnets, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Knox's poetry deals with love relationships, the human condition, Christian discipleship, the grandeur of God, the "Woman Question," and relations between Ireland and England. In each of these areas her poems achieve a directness, clarity, and rigor that distinguishes them from the simplistic didacticism of the conventional Victorian "poetess."

Lucy Spring Rice was born on 9 November 1845 at Hither Green, Lewisham, one of ten children and eight daughters of Stephen Edmond Spring Rice, Commissioner of Customs, and Ellen Spring Rice, née Frere. Her father enjoyed lifelong friendships with Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, and Edward FitzGerald that had begun during his school years at Bury St. Edmunds Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge. The poet Sir Henry Taylor was...