Guiney, Louise Imogen (1861-1920). American poet and critic. Guiney was born in Roxbury, MA, to Irish Catholic parents. When her father died in 1887 from wounds suffered as a Union Army officer in the Civil War, the strain on family finances nearly ended her education, but she graduated from Elmhurst Academy, an elite convent school in Providence, RI. For the next twenty-one years, she lived with her mother and sister Grace in Auburndale and Boston, MA. She began publishing poetry and essays in the 1880s and quickly became part of the Boston-area cultural elite, numbering among her friends Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. In 1894 she received a patronage appointment as Auburndale post-mistress to supplement her literary income. Anti-Catholic protestors boycotted her post office, causing her income to drop, but counter-protesters, literary figures and Catholics from throughout the country, ordered their stamps from her to salvage her income. In 1899 she became a cataloger at the Boston Public Library, likely with the intervention of Alice Jordan, her Auburndale friend and neighbor. In 1901, Guiney moved with her aunt to England, where she studied at Oxford University but struggled financially. In theme and content, Guiney’s poetry evoked seventeenth-century British lyric poetry. In the Pittsburgh Gazette in 1902 Cather praised Guiniey’s “excellence in expression and the mastery of meter” and later wrote aspiring poet Zoë Akins that the “richness and delicacy and restraint” of Guiney’s poetry should be a model for contemporary poets (#0152). As an editor at McClure’s Magazine Cather purchased Guiney’s poetry and met her briefly in 1909 in Auburndale, where Guiney was visiting her mother. Thereafter their correspondence became more personal. Guiney died in England. In the 1920s Cather wanted to edit a selection of Guiney’s verse, but Ferris Greenslet at Houghton Mifflin was unable to come to an understanding with Grace Guiney.