Anna Wickham was the pseudonym of Edith Alice Mary Harper (1883 – 1947), an English/Australian poet who was a pioneer of modernist poetry, and one of the most important female poets writing during the first half of the twentieth century. She was friend to other important writers of the time, such as D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Katherine Mansfield and Dylan Thomas. Wickham lived a transnational, unconventional life, moving between Australia, England and France. She is remembered as a modernist figure and feminist writer, although one who did not command sustained critical attention in her lifetime, although her poetry did earn her a major reputation at the time of writing and had been frequently anthologised. Her literary reputation has improved since her death and she is now regarded as an important early 20th-century woman writer. Early life She was born in Wimbledon, London, and brought up in Australia, mostly in Brisbane and Sydney. Her pen-names imply an Australian self-identification: "Wickham" was adopted after a Brisbane street. She had used "John Oland" for her first collection, which alludes to the Jenolan Caves in New South Wales. Wickham returned to London in 1904, where she took singing lessons and won a drama scholarship (at the future RADA, just founded). She pursued her singing in Paris in 1905 with Jean de Reszke, the Polish tenor. In 1906 she married Patrick Hepburn, a City of London solicitor with interests in Romanesque architecture, and later astronomy. They had four sons. They lived first in central London, then in family houses in Hampstead: Downshire Hill, from 1909, and then from 1919 a house on Parliament Hill which would be her permanent home. She became involved in the contemporary philanthropic movement concerned with maternal care, at St Pancras Hospital. Career and strife Her first collection, Songs by John Oland, was published in 1911, and had a particular focus on the conflict between men and women, depicted in such poems as "Song of the Low-Caste Wife", "Surrender" and "Divorce". Other subjects included the ambition to be a writer, a post-Darwin loss of religious faith, and motherhood. Her husband was angered at her publishing a book, and subsequently also captured the interest of one of his friends in his astronomical circles. He was known to be possessive, and generally unsupportive of her singing and writing, which may have been a major factor leading to her breakdown and psychiatric