Annie Matheson

She contributed to several contemporary periodicals by writing short essays and biographies. Although she published several works, there is no significant biographical account of Matheson's life.

Annie Matheson was born in 1853 in Blackheath, Kent. She was the daughter of Rev. James Matheson, a Congregationalist minister in Nottingham and his wife Elizabeth Cripps, and older sister to Percy Ewing Matheson besides nine other siblings. Privately educated in Nottingham, Matheson discovered a passion for writing as she began to contribute to literary journalism. Her religious family background seems to have greatly influenced her outlook and writing. Her work exhibited both selflessness and confidence. Though one of a large family, she neither married nor had children. The 1911 England Census records her as living at the age of fifty-eight at Beutham, Maybury Hill, Woking as a "spinster" and head of the household, whose occupation was literature and journalism.

At the age of thirty-seven, she published her first book, The Religion of Humanity and Other Poems (1890). In 1899, Matheson published Selected Poems Old and New as a compilation of popular shorter poems. Many preceding publications encompassed her strong faith and the beauty of God's nature. In her book, Leave of Prose...With Two Studies by May Sinclair (1912), her writing shifted to a more social-critical perspective as she evaluated hard work and knowledge. Children were her primary audience as she wrote The Story of a Brave Child: A Child's Life of Joan of Arc (1910) because she wanted them to understand the power of faith upon an individual. In her well-known book Florence Nightingale: A biography (1913), Matheson described Nightingale's greatest accomplishment, the invention of modern nursing, in 374 pages. She acknowledged Nightingale's generous motivations and tireless efforts during the Crimean War to care for the British wounded. By reading this biography, contemporary readers learned of Nightingale's campaign for sanitation and her establishment of public-healthcare in Britain. Following this publication, Matheson returned to publishing several volumes for children in a series called "Rose and Dragon," which includes A Plain Friend (1920) However, the series was never finished due to her death in 1924 in London.