Name Isa Knox | Role Poet | |
Isa Knox (née Craig; 1831–1903) was a Scottish poet of the 19th century.
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Biography
Isa Knox was the only child of John Craig, hosier and glover, born on 17 October 1831 in Edinburgh. In childhood she lost both parents, and was reared by her grandmother, leaving school in her tenth year. A close study of standard English authors developed her literary tastes; and, after contributing verses to The Scotsman with the signature Isa, she was regularly employed on the paper in 1853.
Coming to London in 1857 she was appointed secretary to the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and held the position till she married, in May 1866, her cousin, John Knox, an iron merchant of London. In 1858 she won with a resonant ode a prize of £50 offered at the Crystal Palace for a centenary poem on Burns. There were 621 candidates, among them being Frederic William Henry Myers, Gerald Massey, and Arthur Joseph Munby. After her marriage she contributed occasionally to Fraser, Good Words, and the Quiver, edited the Argosy for a short time, and published some volumes of poems and juvenile histories.
She died at Brockley, Suffolk, in December 1903.
Literary analysis
According to the Dictionary of National Biography, in verse Mrs. Knox produced nothing that surpassed the Burns ode. Her first volume, Poems by Isa (1866), showed some promise, and some lyric quality appeared in Poems: an Offering to Lancashire (1863), an anthology edited by Knox; Duchess Agnes, a Drama and other Poems (1864); and Songs of Consolation (1874). Dr. A. H. Japp edited a Selection from Mrs. Knox's Poems in 1892. Of Mrs. Knox's prose work The Essence of Slavery (1863) summarised Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, and Esther West (1870; 6th edit. 1884) was a well-constructed story. Mrs. Knox's Little Folk's History of England (1872) reached its 30th thousand in 1899, and the author adapted from it a successful Easy History for Upper Standards (1884). Tales on the Parables, two series, appeared in 1872–7.