The name "Dora Greenwell" was for many years supposed to be the pseudonym of a writer of rare spiritual insight and fine poetic genius.

[1] Sad reverses befell the household of Greenwell Ford in the year 1848, when, owing no doubt to mismanagement, the property had to be sold.

For a time thereafter, Greenwell, with her father and mother, resided at Ovingham Rectory, in Northumberland, where her eldest brother, William, was holding the living for a friend.

It was while she lived in this village, in 1848, that she issued her earliest volume of poems, which was published by William Pickering and extended to a little over two hundred pages.

After a short time working with her brother Alan who was Rector of Golborne, she moved back to Durham and lived with her mother[3] amongst many friends and relatives—her father having died in 1854.

She was destined to become an accomplished essayist, and to produce some prose works which claimed a very high place among books of a deeply thoughtful and spiritual kind.

During some seven or eight years, Greenwell wrote some poems which were finally published by Bell and Daldy, with the title, Carolina Crucis.

[6] She also wrote biographies of French priest Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire and American Quaker John Woolman.

In the autumn of 1881, she went to her brother, Alan Greenwell at Clifton, Bristol, much weakened in health, and suffering from the results of an accident.