Isa Knox (writer)

Due to financial hardship, she was forced to leave school in her tenth year; consequently, from a young age, her literary abilities were largely self-taught.

[9] In the 1881 United Kingdom census, the family, along with John's older brother William, a book-keeper also working in the iron trade, and a servant is listed as living at 13 South Hill Park, in Hempstead, Kent.

[12] After coming to London in 1857, Craig was appointed to be the first female secretary to the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and held the position, despite enduring public scorn for several years due to her sex.

"[6] A friend and comrade was another major feminist figure, Elizabeth "Bessie" Rayner Parkes, whom Craig had met through her work with The Waverley Journal, an Edinburgh women's magazine.

In her 1910 memoir Recollections of What I Saw, What I Lived Through, and What I Learned, during More than Fifty Years of Social and Literary Experience, the Scottish poet Isabella Fyvie Mayo describes hearing a well-connected, literary Englishwoman, Miss Y- , who detested "gutter blood," cast aspersions on the lowly work Isa had taken in Edinburgh to "secure independence before she had made her mark in literature," even bringing it up to her face at a public gathering.

Out of 621 candidates, among them such literary figures as Frederic William Henry Myers, Gerald Massey, and Arthur Joseph Munby, Isa won the prize.

This poem remains her most cited and praised work, one stanza of which appears below:[18] The land he trod Hath now become a place of pilgrimage; Where dearer are the daisies of the sod That could his song engage.

The hoary hawthorn, wreathed Above the bank on which his limbs he flung While some sweet plaint he breathed; The streams he wandered near; The maidens whom he loved; the songs he sung;—

In 1863, she contributed along with the likes of Charles Kingsley, W. Holman Hunt, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hughes to The Reader, a weekly review of literature, art, and science, newly published in London.

The 1911 United Kingdom census reveals that her unmarried daughter Margaret, widowed husband, and his brother continued to live at the same address, with two domestic servants.

[21] It appears that on 27 May 1922, Margaret, aged 52 and giving her race as "Scotch," arrived in Quebec on the ocean liner RMS Victorian.

Of Mrs. Knox's prose work, The Essence of Slavery (1863) summarized Fanny Kemble's influential Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, and Esther West (1870; 6th edit.