Winifred M. Letts (10 February 1882–7 June 1972) was an English-born writer who spent most of her life in Ireland. She was known for her poetry, novels, and plays. Biography Winifred Mabel Letts was born on 10 February 1882 to Mary Isabel (née Ferrier) and Reverend Ernest Frederick Letts. It is widely accepted by biographers that she was born in Salford, Lancashire, England. She was educated first at St. Anne’s School, Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire and later Alexandra College in Dublin, Ireland. She spent summer childhood holidays in Knockmaroon Park, Dublin, her maternal grandparents' home. After her father's death, she and her mother moved to Ireland from England and lived in a house on Glenart Avenue called Dal Riada in the Dublin suburb of Blackrock. In 1915, during World War I, Letts joined the Volunteer Aid Detachment and was assigned to the Manchester Base Hospital in England. Trained to offer physical therapy to wounded soldiers, she served with the Almeric Paget Massage Corps in Manchester and Alnwick, Northumberland. In 1926 she married widower William Henry Foster Verschoyle. William died in 1943 and Letts moved to England to live with her sisters in Faversham, Kent. In the 1950s, she returned to Ireland and purchased Beech Cottage in Killiney, County Dublin. She moved to Tivoli Nursing Home, Dún Laoghaire, in the late 1960s. Letts died on 7 June 1972 and is buried in Rathcoole, County Dublin. Writing career She began her career as a playwright, writing two one-act plays for the Abbey Theatre: The Eyes of the Blind (1906) and The Challenge (1909). Letts' story "The Company of Saints and of Angels" was published by The Irish Review under the editorship of Thomas MacDonagh in January 1912. Her first poetry collection, Songs from Leinster, was published in 1913. Before that six of her poems had been set to music by C. V. Stanford in A Sheaf of Songs from Leinster (publ. 1914) of which the most famous is "A Soft Day". In 1916, by which time she was working as a nurse, she published Hallowe'en and Other Poems of the War. The collection was re-issued the following year as The Spires of Oxford, and other Poems. A 'Publisher's Note' in this 1917 volume explained that "The verdict of the public, as shown by continual requests to republish, is that "The Spires of Oxford" is the most important poem in the volume—and therefore in