Annie Louisa Coghill

COGHILL, Annie (Anna) Louisa (née Walker). b. Brewood, Staffordshire, 23 June 1836; d. Bath, Somerset, 7 July 1907. She was the daughter of a civil engineer, who took his family to Canada to work on the railways when Annie was in her ’teens, ca. 1853. She began writing poetry as a child and young woman, and her volume Leaves from the Backwoods was published anonymously in Montreal in 1861. It contained the poem for which she is remembered, ‘Work! for the night is coming’*. The family returned to England ca. 1863, and Walker obtained a post as secretary-companion to a distant cousin, the writer Margaret Oliphant. Encouraged by Oliphant, she published several novels (A Canadian Heroine,...