Winifred Mabel Letts Biography

Winifred Mabel Letts (1882 - 1972) was an English writer, with strong Irish connections, known for her novels, plays and poetry.

She was born in Manchester or Cheshire, of an English father (Rector Ernest Letts) and Irish mother (Isabel Mary Ferrier). She spent many childhood holidays in Knockmaroon, Phoenix Park, Dublin, which was her mother's home. After her father's death, she and her mother returned to Ireland and lived in a house called Dal Riada in Blackrock, County Dublin. She was educated first in Bromley in Kent and later at Alexandra College in Dublin. She trained as a masseuse and during World War I worked at army camps in Manchester.

In 1926 she married widower William Henry Foster Verschoyle, of Kilberry, County Kildare; they lived in Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin, and in County Kildare. After his death in 1943 she lived with her sisters in Faversham, Kent. She returned to Ireland in 1950 and bought Beech Cottage in Killiney, County Dublin, where she lived until finally moving to Tivoli Nursing Home, Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin in the late 1960s. She died in 1972 and is buried in Rathcoole, Co. Dublin.

Her first poetry collection, Songs from Leinster, was published in 1913. Before that some of her poems had been set to music by C. V. Stanford. She had begun by writing drama. She continued to write novels and children's fiction. In 1916 she published her initial poems of World War I, during which she worked as a nurse. Her oft-recited war ballad "The Spires of Oxford" was published in 1917 as the featured poem in The Spires of Oxford, and Other Poems.

Her poem The Deserter (written in 1916), describing the feelings and fate of a man terrified by the war, is often used in collections of World War I poetry.