About Jean Ingelow
Jean Ingelow, born on March 17, 1820, in Boston, Lincolnshire, a town in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and died on July 20, 1897, in Kensington, a district of London, was a novelist, short story writer, and poet known for her children’s books as well as her fantasy novels and short stories, which she published under the pen name Orris. She is one of the leading figures of Victorian literature.Ingelow began her literary career by publishing poems and stories in various magazines under the pseudonym Orris; her first collection of poems, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings, published in 1850, caught the attention of Alfred Lord Tennyson, who wrote about Orris: “I tell you, what you have written is far better than anything I have ever written.”
In 1850, she anonymously published her first volume of poetry, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings. A year later, she also anonymously published the novel “Allerton and Dreux”, which addressed the theological tensions between evangelical and traditional Anglicans. Between 1851 and 1857, Ingelow regularly published short stories under the pseudonym Orris in the evangelical Youth Magazine, an activity that served as a springboard for a further literary career. From January 1857, she also served as the magazine's editor for a year. In 1860, she published these stories in a collected edition, Tales of Orris, and further publications based on these stories followed for decades afterward, often in revised form. Her breakthrough came in 1863 with the publication of her poetry collection Poems. Several poems from the collection were set to music by Ingelow's friend Charlotte Alington Barnard, and the poem “Songs of Seven”, about the female life cycle, which was included in the Poems collection, was published separately in 1881.
Further successful poetry collections followed, such as A Story of Doom (1867), whose central poem addressed the biblical flood. She also published other novels, including the partly autobiographical adventure novel Off the Skelligs (1872) and its second volume Fated to be Free (1875), the sensation novel Sarah de Berenger (1879), and the social novels Don John (1881) and John Jerome (1886). She also published children's literature. Some of her books were illustrated by her Kensington neighbor, John Everett Millais. Stylistically, Ingelow's work is characterized by nostalgia and clarity, and she often drew inspiration from the landscapes of her native Lincolnshire. According to literary scholar Kathleen Hickok, Ingelow is regularly compared to William Wordsworth, but also to Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti, because of the “natural and domestic scenes” in her poems. Her work became popular not only in England but also in the United States. Ingelow died in 1897 at the age of 77 in Kensington and was buried in Brompton Cemetery. In the 20th century, she largely fell into obscurity; current literary analyses of her work, if they occur at all, focus on her poetry.
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