English poet Adelaide Anne Procter was BOTD in 1825. Born in London, the daughter of poet Bryan Waller Procter, she grew up in a literary environment, with family friends including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth. Largely self-educated, she showed an early aptitude for languages and literature, and attended Queens College in her teens. In 1853, she submitted her poems to Dickens’ periodical Household Words, adopting the pseudonym Mary Berwick to avoid associations with her father. Dickens duly published the poems, not discovering her true identity for nearly a year. He continued to mentor and publish her work, arranging for her poems to be collected into the two-volume series Legends and Lyrics. A highly popular writer of the mid-Victorian period, she was reportedly the favourite poet of Queen Victoria, with celebrity fans including novelist William Makepeace Thackeray and composer Arthur Sullivan (who set her poem The Lost Chord to music). A convert to Roman Catholicism, she dedicated much of her life to charity work, supporting feminist causes and working to improve the situations of “fallen women”. Discreetly lesbian, she refused a number of marriage proposals, and had a relationship with journalist Matilda Hays, to whom she dedicated Legends and Lyrics. She died of tuberculosis in 1864, aged 38. Largely forgotten by the 20th century, interest in her life and work was revived by feminist scholars in the 1970s.