Ingelow, JEAN, a popular poetess and novelist, was born at Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1820. Her first efforts in verse were published anonymously in 1850 under the title of A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings. These gave indication of considerable power, as well as of the influence of Tennyson and Mrs Browning, to whose writings she appears to have been strongly drawn in youth.
A good deal of Miss Ingelow’s poetry is of a devotional or religious cast, introspective in quality and melodious in style. But she has also written some powerful ballads, and of her minor pieces The High-tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1871, is probably both the finest and the best known. Of her larger poems A Story of Doom (1867) has been the most successful. To about the same time belong Deborah’s Book and the Lonely Rock, Grandmother’s Shoe, The Suspicious Jackdaw, The Life of John Smith, The Minnows with Silver Tails, Studies for Stories. Among her novels may be mentioned Off the Skelligs, Fated to be Free (1875), Don John (1876), and Sarah de Berenger (1880). An edition of poems appeared in 1880–87 (3 vols.). She died 20th July 1897.