Louisa Shore from Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography
Shore,
Louisa Catherine (1824–1895), poet and
writer, was born at Potton, Bedfordshire, on 20 February 1824. She was
the fourth of at least five children and the youngest of the three daughters of
Thomas Shore (1793–1863), Church of
England clergyman and author, son of the Revd Thomas William Shore
(1755/6–1822) of Otterton, Devon, and Juliana Mackworth Praed (b. c.1758),
who were married at West Teignmouth, Devon, on 8 November 1785. Thomas Shore
came from a good family; he was the nephew of John Shore, first Lord Teignmouth
(1751–1834), and his mother was the aunt of the poet Winthrop Mackworth Praed.
Thomas Shore matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, on 9 June 1810 and
graduated BA in 1814 and MA in 1818. He was a scholar at the college from 1812
to 1818. He took orders and married Margaret Anne Twopeny (d. c.1859),
daughter of the Revd R. Twopeny, at Little Casterton, Rutland, on 19 December
1818. They had at least four other children in addition to Louisa Catherine
Shore: (Margaret) Emily Shore (1819–1839), Richard Noel Shore (bap.
1821), Arabella Susanna Shore (bap. 1822, d. in or after 1897),
and Mackworth Charles Shore (bap. 1825, d. 1860). After a short career
as a schoolmaster at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and a period at Potton,
Bedfordshire, Thomas Shore settled at Everton,
Bedfordshire, where he received private pupils, some of whom later attained
distinction—notably Charles John, Earl Canning, George Francis Robert, third
Lord Harris, and Granville George Leveson-Gower, second Earl Granville. He also
served as curate in the neighbouring parish of Cockayne Hatley. He wrote many
classical and theological works but, holding somewhat unorthodox views on religion,
declined preferment in the church. In 1863 he published The
Churchman and the Freethinker, or, A Friendly Address to the Orthodox, a
pamphlet which attracted notice. Thomas Shore died on 4 July 1863, at his home
at Elmers End, Beckenham, London.
Shore's three daughters were endowed with great literary gifts and enthusiasm
for learning. (Margaret) Emily Shore was a gifted poet and writer whose life
was cut short by tuberculosis. Louisa Shore spent time in Fulham, Middlesex, as
a young woman, where she met Fanny Kemble and Sara Coleridge. She also
travelled to France and spent eighteen months in and around Paris between 1851
and 1853. Her first published work was ‘War Music’, a poem on the Crimean War,
which had been sent without her knowledge to The Spectator
by her sister Arabella. The poem was reprinted in War Lyrics
(1855), a collaboration between the two sisters, who produced three more
volumes of poetry together. Louisa Shore's elegy on the deaths of her sister
Emily and brother Mackworth Charles (lost at sea in 1860) was favourably
compared to George Eliot's ‘Oh! may I join the choir invisible’ (Shore, 43). In
1861 she published Hannibal: a Poem of Two Parts,
which received good reviews in The Athenaeum and the Saturday Review.
Louisa and Arabella Shore were early and enthusiastic advocates of the cause of
women. An article by Louisa Shore in the Westminster Review
for April 1874, reprinted several times as a pamphlet, contains a prescient
discussion of the directions subsequently taken by the women's movement. She
lived during the latter part of her life with Arabella at Orchard Poyle,
Berkshire, near Taplow, Buckinghamshire. She died, unmarried, at 16 Hillside,
Wimbledon, Surrey, on 24 May 1895 and was cremated in Brookwood cemetery, near
Woking, Surrey.
L. H. Cust, rev. Megan A. Stephan
Sources
L.
Shore, Poems: with a memoir by Arabella Shore and an appreciation by
Frederic Harrison (1897) · Blain, Clements &
Grundy, Feminist comp., 979 · S. J. Kunitz and H. Haycraft, eds., British
authors of the nineteenth century (1936), 559–60 · CGPLA
Eng. & Wales (1895) · IGI [Thomas
Shore] · Foster, Alum. Oxon., 1715–1886
[Thomas Shore] · personal knowledge (1897) · private information (1897) · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1863)
Likenesses
portrait,
repro. in Shore, Poems, frontispiece
Wealth at death
£8227
3s. 9d.: resworn probate, Nov 1895, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
· under £12,000—Thomas Shore: probate, 11 Nov 1863, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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L. H. Cust, ‘Shore,
Louisa Catherine (1824–1895)’, rev. Megan A.
Stephan, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University
Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25453, accessed 19 Nov 2005] Louisa Catherine Shore (1824–1895):
doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25453 |
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