Webster, Augusta

(1837-1894)

   Julia Augusta Davies, the daughter of an admiral, was born at Poole, Dorset. She attended classes at the Cambridge school of art, and in 1863 married Thomas Webster, fellow and later law lecturer of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1864, under the pseudonym Cecil Home, she published Lesley's Guardians, a novel in three volumes. She contributed two highly acclaimed essays to Examiner: The Translation of Poetry and Transcript and a Transcription. A keen educationalist, she twice served on the London school board and was a strong advocate of the introduction of technical instruction into elementary schools. She was also a supporter of woman's suffrage. Some of her other poetry publications: Blanche Lisle, and Other Poems, 1860. Lilian Gray, 1864. The Prometheus Bound, 1866 (translation into English verse from Æschylus, 525-456 B.C.). Dramatic Studies, 1866. Medea, 1868 (translated from Euripides, c.480-406 B.C.). Portraits, 1870. A Book of Rhyme, 1881 (in the form of Italian peasant songs). Mother and Daughter, 1895 (an uncompleted sonnet sequence). Some of her poems: "Abbess Ursula's Lecture," "The Castaway," "The Snow Waste," "With the Dead."

   Sources: A Treasury of Minor British Poetry. J. Churton Collins, ed. Edward Arnold, 1896. Bread and Roses: An Antholog y of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Poetry by Women Writers. Diana Scott, ed. Virago Press, 1982. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition, 1.1. Dramatic Studies of Augusta Webster. Macmillan and Co., 1866. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Poem hunter (www.poemhunter.com). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Home Book of Verse. Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1953. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds, eds. Blackwell, 1991.