author
Kathleen Montgomery Wallace
1890–1958
A British poet shaped by the losses of World War I, remembered for spare, moving verses gathered in Lost City (1918). Her work turns Cambridge landscapes and private grief into poems that still feel intimate and clear.
1 Audiobook
Lost city : Verses
by Kathleen Montgomery Wallace
About the author
Born Kathleen Montgomery Coates in Cambridge, she was the daughter of William Montgomery Coates, a Fellow and lecturer at Queens’ College, and she was educated at Girton. She later married Major James Hill Wallace and became known as Kathleen Montgomery Wallace.
She is chiefly remembered for Lost City: Verses, published in 1918 and now available through Project Gutenberg. The collection is closely associated with World War I, mixing scenes of Cambridge and the fens with elegy, remembrance, and the emotional shock of wartime loss.
Reliable online information about her is limited, but the surviving record shows a writer whose poems were rooted in place and feeling rather than grand rhetoric. That quiet, personal quality is a big part of why her work still stands out today.