Louise Imogen Guiney was born in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, on January 7, 1861 to Patrick Robert and Jane Margaret (Doyle) Guiney. Her father enlisted in the Irish Ninth Massachusetts Infantry shortly after she was born, and suffered injuries in the American Civil War from which he never fully recovered. He died in 1877, and when Louise graduated from Elmhurst Academy in 1879, she began writing freelance articles for magazines and newspapers to supplement the family income.

Guiney's earliest poems appeared in the Pilot, the Transcript, and the New York Home Journal. She published her first book of poetry, Songs at the Start in 1884 and a collection of essays in the Goose Quill Papers literary magazine in 1885. By 1887 she had released her second book of poetry, The White Sail, which became one of her most popular works. She also published a book of literary criticism, A Little English Gallery (1894).

In addition to her writing, in 1894 Guiney become the postmistress of Auburndale, Massachusetts, and she later worked in the cataloging department of the Boston Public Library. Despite increasing hearing loss, she moved to Oxford, England in 1901. In the early 1900s she served as editor for collections by British poets including Henry Vaughan and Katherine Philips. In 1913 she began research for an anthology of Catholic poets in collaboration with Geoffrey Bliss, SJ. The work was not completed at the time of her death at age 59, in Chipping Campden, England, but was published posthumously as Recusant Poets (1938).

Sources:

Brown, Alice. Louise Imogen Guiney. New York: MacMillan Company, 1921.

Fairbanks, Henry George. Louise Imogen Guiney. New York: Twayne Publishers, c. 1978.

"The Irish Belle of Boston Letters," The Boston Irish Reporter, February 1998.