Lydia Emilie Florentine Jannsen ( – ), known by her pen name Lydia Koidula, was an Estonian poet. Her sobriquet means 'Lydia of the Dawn' in Estonian. It was given to her by the writer Carl Robert Jakobson. She is also frequently referred to as Koidulaulik – 'Singer of the Dawn'. In Estonia, like elsewhere in Europe, writing was not considered a suitable career for a respectable young lady in the mid-19th century. Koidula's poetry and her newspaper work for her populist father, Johann Voldemar Jannsen (1819–1890) remained anonymous. In spite of this, she was a major literary figure, the founder of Estonian theatre, and closely allied to Carl Robert Jakobson (1841–1882), the influential radical and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882), writer of the Estonian national epic, Kalevipoeg (The Son of Kalev). Over time, she has achieved the status of the national poet in Estonia. Biography Lydia Jannsen was born in Vändra (Fennern), Estonia. The family moved to the nearby county town of Pärnu (Pernau) in 1850 where, in 1857, her father started the first local Estonian language newspaper and where Lydia attended the German-language grammar school. The Jannsens moved to the university town of Tartu (Dorpat) in 1864. Any kind of expression of nationalism, including publication in indigenous languages, was a sensitive subject in the Russian Empire, however the rule of czar Alexander II (1855–1881) was relatively liberal and Jannsen managed to persuade the imperial censorship to allow him to publish the first Estonian-language newspaper with nationwide distribution in 1864. Both the Pärnu local and the national newspaper were called Postimees (The Courier). Lydia wrote for her father on both papers besides publishing her own work. In 1873, she married Eduard Michelson, an army physician, and moved to Kronstadt (Russian naval base on an island near St. Petersburg). In 1876–78 the Michelsons visited Breslau, Strasbourg and Vienna. Koidula lived in Kronstadt for 13 years and albeit during that time she would spend the summers in Estonia, she reportedly never stopped feeling inconsolably homesick. Lydia Koidula was the mother of three children. She died from breast cancer on 11 August 1886. Her last poem was Enne surma — Eestimaale! (Before death, to Estonia!). Works Koidula's most important work, Emajõe ööbik, (The Nightingale of the Emajõgi River), was published in 1867. Three years earlier, in 1864, Adam Peterson, a farmer, and Johann Köler, a fashionable Estonian portraitist living in Saint Petersburg, had