Nora Chesson (2 January 1871 – 14 April 1906) was an English journalist and poet. She won for herself a distinct celebrity as a contributor to most of the English periodicals and newspapers of her time.

Biography

Eleanor Jane Hopper was born in Exeter, 2 January 1871. Her father, Capt. Harman Baillie Hopper, was Irish. She was a participant in the Irish literary movement of the 1890s, having some influence on

W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...

in particular with her ''Ballads in Prose'' (1894). Her career as an authoress in poetry and in prose began in 1887, when she was not quite seventeen years of age, and she went on increasing her literary reputation until her death. Over some of her poems there was an atmosphere of melancholy which might seem as if it cast upon them the shadow of a too early death. She provided the English translation to Thadgh O'Donoghue's libretto for the Irish opera ''

Muirgheis ''Muirgheis'' is a 1903 opera by Thomas O'Brien Butler (1861–1915), written originally in the Irish language. Caving to market and political pressures of the time, the piece was mainly staged in English. Nonetheless, some consider it the first ...

'' (1903) by

Thomas O'Brien Butler Thomas O'Brien Butler (3 November 1861 – 7 May 1915; lost on the '' Lusitania''), was an Irish composer who wrote the Irish-language opera ''Muirgheis'' (1903). Biography O'Brien Butler, as he was generally known, was born in Caherciveen, Cou ...

(1861–1915). In 1901, she married the English man of letters

Wilfrid Hugh Chesson Wilfrid ( – 709 or 710) was an English bishop and saint. Born a Northumbrian noble, he entered religious life as a teenager and studied at Lindisfarne, at Canterbury, in Francia, and at Rome; he returned to Northumbria in about 660, and ...

(1870–1953). She died 14 April 1906. Five volumes of her selected poems were published that year by Alston Rivers, of London, which included a short biographical note by the editor, her husband, and an introductory appreciation by Ford Madox Hueffer.

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Warwick Gould Warwick Leslie Gould, (born 7 April 1947) is a literary scholar born in Sydney. He specializes in the Irish Literary Revival, particularly in the writings of W. B. Yeats, and in Textual Transmission studies and the History of the Book. Having st ...

‘Hopper , Eleanor Jane (1871–1906)’
in: ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (print issue: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), retrieved 2 January 2008. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Chesson, Nora 1871 births 1906 deaths English women poets 19th-century English poets 19th-century English women writers 19th-century English writers