Lettice D'Oyly Walters

Walters was born in Dorchester, Dorset, England on September 24, 1880[1] to Colonel Charles D’Oyly Harmar (1844-1922) and Alice Mary, née Byas (1848-1924).

[2][3] Her siblings were:[4][5] Walters spent her first twenty years in Ramridge House, a one-hundred-acre estate in Weyhill, Hampshire, where she was educated by a governess.

[16] Lettice solicited a series of poems and tributes from friends and family, and published them privately through the Swan Press in a small book simply titled Michael (1935).

[22] The title of the volume comes from a song in the verse drama Pippa Passes (1841) by Robert Browning: “The year's at the spring / And day's at the morn.” In his introduction to the anthology, the poet, bookseller, and editor Harold Monro commented that the anthology was “readable” because it didn't deal with “big themes” of the day, such as the recently concluded First World War and ongoing action related to Women's Suffrage.

Yet a number of contributions were from war poets, among them Rupert Brooke ("The Soldier"), Edward Wyndham Tennant (“Home Thoughts in Laventie”), Julian Grenfell (“Into Battle”), and Robert Ernest Vernéde (“A Petition”).

The Studio praised the book as “attractively got up” and singled out Clarke as “an artist of marked individuality, and the imaginative faculty which he possesses in a high degree is well shown in these drawings.”[23] Clarke's biographer Nicola Gordon Bowe posits that unillustrated versions of the text marketed as An Anthology of Recent Poetry (1920) were sold prior to the release of the illustrated gift book in order to offset copyright permissions for the poetry and fees for the illustrations.

As with The Year’s at the Spring, she included several female poets, among them Eva Gore-Booth, Winifred Letts, Dora Sigerson, and Katharine Tynan.

The Sybil Campbell Library, which owns many of the books, notes that Swan Press “produced limited editions, usually of 100 numbered copies, in fine print, handset in a variety of typefaces by L.D.O.

Contributors to the memorial received a copy of Swan Press's edition of Ten Fables by Robert Lewis Stevenson, illustrated by Rachel Russell (1928).