Songs

Oxford: Printed by H. Daniel, Fellow of Worcester College, 1896 Limited to 200 copies, printed at the Daniel Press. Original printed wrappers, overlapping edges. Twelvemo. Light discoloration to wrappers, two short tears.A very good, clean copy. Margaret Louisa Woods (1855-1945), who was known to her friends as Daisy, was the daughter Granville Bradley (1821–1903), dean of Westminster and schoolmaster, and the wife of Henry George Woods, who became President of Trinity College, Oxford and Master of the Temple. She was also a longstanding friend of the printer, C.H.O. Daniel, and contributes a memoir of him, "Henry Daniel and his Home," in The Daniel Press: Memorials of C.H.O. Daniel, With a Bibliography of the Press, 1845-1919 (pp. 22-31). Daniel published two of her works, Lyrics (1888) and the present volume. A poem of hers also appeared in the Daniel Press publication, Garland for Rachel (1881). Woods later had a distinguished career as a novelist and nonfiction writer. Her fiction includes A Village Tragedy (1887), Esther Vanhomrigh (1891), Sons of the Sword (1905), and The King's Revoke (1905). "Later novels treat circus people, events from English, French, and Spanish history, and literary figures (Swift and Wordsworth). Her most imaginative story, 'The Invader' (1907) depicts an unexceptional woman student at Oxford who, after hypnotism, periodically finds her personality taken over by an uninhibited second self that eventually undermines her marriage and causes her death" (DNB). She wrote several more volumes of verse, and her collected poems were published in 1913.