During an age when women's participation in the world of classical music was limited, Rosa Harriet Newmarch met, befriended, and wrote about some of the greatest European composers and conductors of her time. Her love of music, talent for writing, and ear for musical composition inform her famous nonpoetical works, but they coalesce in her two volumes of poetry, Horo Amoris: Songs and Sonnets (1903) and Songs to a Singer and Other Verses (1906). In many of these poems Newmarch expresses the same emotive power she identifies in the music of Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, and Henry J. Wood.

Newmarch did not perform music herself, nor did she come from a particularly musical family, but a flair for verbal composition can be traced in her not so distant ancestry. She was born Rosa Harriet Jeaffreson 18 December 1857 in Leamington, Warwick, the daughter of a physician, Samuel Jeaffreson, and the...