Mrs. Harry Coghill

Anna Louisa Walker, who also published as Mrs. Harry Coghill, was born in Staffordshire, England, in 1836 and spent important years in Canada after her father, a civil engineer, moved the family there. In Pointe-Lévy and later Sarnia, she taught at a girls' school run with her sisters, and those years helped shape the Canadian settings and backwoods atmosphere that appear in her early writing.

She began publishing poetry while still young, later gathering some of it in Leaves from the Backwoods. Her best-known poem, "The Night Cometh," became the hymn "Work, for the Night Is Coming," which gave her lasting recognition beyond literary circles. After returning to England, she worked in the household of her cousin, the novelist Margaret Oliphant, who encouraged her fiction writing.

Walker went on to write several novels and two poetry collections, and after her 1884 marriage she often appeared in print as Mrs. Harry Coghill. She also edited The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant. No suitable verified portrait image was found from the pages reviewed, so no profile image is included here.