Eliza Ogilvy
Eliza Ogilvy, born Eliza Dick in 1822 in Perth, Scotland, was a notable poet whose early life was shaped by her experiences in India, where she lived with her grandfather. After returning to Scotland, she married David Ogilvy in 1843 and began writing poetry inspired by personal events, including the birth of her first child, Rose. The tragic death of Rose at sixteen months profoundly affected Ogilvy, influencing much of her later work, including her first published collection, "Rose Leaves," in 1845, which honored her daughter's memory. Throughout her life, Ogilvy explored themes of childhood, motherhood, and loss, often drawing upon Scottish and Italian folklore in her poetry. Her friendship with fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning during her family's time in Italy further enriched her literary pursuits and led to the publication of another poetry collection based on Italian lore in 1851. After her husband's death in 1879, Ogilvy continued to write until her passing in 1912, leaving a substantial body of unpublished work. Her contributions to poetry reflect her enduring engagement with the emotional complexities of life and family.
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Eliza Ogilvy
Writer
- Born: January 6, 1822
- Birthplace: Perth, Scotland
- Died: January 3, 1912
- Place of death: Ealing, London, England
Biography
Eliza Ogilvy was born Eliza Dick in Perth, Scotland in 1822; her parents were Louisa and Abercromby Dick. Along with her sister, Charlotte, she spent several years of her childhood in India, where the girls lived with their grandfather, a physician employed by the East Indian Company in Calcutta.
By 1843, she had returned to Scotland and in that year she married David Ogilvy. She gave birth to their first child, Rose, the next year, and the emotions of the event propelled her into her first poetry, a poem on the occasion of Rose’s birth. The poem was preserved in a letter written by David Ogilvy to his aunt and is marked not only by Eliza Ogilvy’s thrill at her new daughter but by realistic detail and a degree of humor.
When Rose Ogilvy died at the age of sixteen months, her mother’s grief was intense, and although the couple had six more children over the next decade, a sense of the fragility of a child’s life marks much of Ogilvy’s later poetry. Ogilvy’s first published volume was a small collection of poems commemorating Rose, Rose Leaves, published in 1845. The following year, Ogilvy published a well-received collection of poems which treated legends from Scottish folklore.
In 1848, the family moved to Italy, where Eliza became friends with poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The two shared common interests in poetry as well as in motherhood and the perils of childhood. In later years, Ogilvy wrote two memoirs of Browning; she also preserved many of Browning’s letters to her, providing later scholars with insight into Browning’s life. Eliza Ogilvy’s friendship with Elizabeth Barrett Browning during the four years the Ogilvies spent in Italy gave Ogilvy a new sense of the demands of poetry.
In 1851, she published a collection of poems based on traditional Italian lore, much as her first full-length volume had dealt with Scottish folklore. Like the first volume, some of the Italian poems dealt with the death of children, a theme which followed her all her writing life. When the family returned to Great Britain, Eliza Ogilvy continued to publish poems in popular journals. After her husband died in 1879, Ogilvy lived in Scotland until 1900, and then moved to live with her daughter Marcia Ogilvy Bell in the London borough of Ealing until her death in 1912. She continued to write until her death and left behind a considerable body of unpublished poems.