Writer. Daughter of WilIiam Gibbs Rogers, wood carver (Dictionary of National Biography). Contributed to Art Journal (Allibone, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, 1858-1871); contributed occasional verses to Sharpe's, Once a Week; and "The Moslem Lover's Complaint" to A Welcome, 1863. Author of Domestic Life in Palestine, 1862 [1861], the pleasant account of her residence in the East (1855-1859) with her brother Edward Thomas Rogers, then vice-consul in Haifa; and My Vis-à-Vis, 1865, verses "written during intervals of rest from work of a more serious nature". Among the verses is "Esther Summerson' s Sorrow", based on Esther's words in Bleak House, "O, too late to know it now, too late, too late". Wrote "Saint Valentine" expressly for H.W., weaving into the lines (with a poet's licence of variation) the quotation from Dickens's masthead: "Familiar in our mouths / As Household Words".

Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971.