"Strong as a man, and gentle as a maid," in the words of Bernard Holland (as quoted by Edith Sichel in Gathered Leaves, 1910), Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was best known in her lifetime as a novelist and essayist, but she is now mostly remembered as a poet. A great-grandniece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, she belonged to a family that had achieved eminence in literature and law. Music was also important to her family. Her mother, Mary Ann Jameson Coleridge, was musically talented, and her father, Arthur Duke Coleridge, was an amateur singer, as well as a lawyer and a staunch member of the Church of England. Among the Coleridges' family friends were Alfred, Lord Tennyson, John Everett Millais, Anthony Trollope, Holman Hunt, John Ruskin, and Fanny Kemble. Most memorable to Mary Coleridge were the occasional visits of a still more august personage: as she wrote toward the end of...