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Georgiana Cooper (1885-1980), writer, painter, nurse, was born on 22 March 1885 at Inglewood Forest, Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. She was the daughter of Roxana (Stowe) and Thomas Henry Cooper. At the age of 10, the Cooper family moved to Random Head, Random Island, Newfoundland, where Georgiana's father had been appointed as the lighthouse keeper. She died at St. Luke's Nursing Home, St. John's, on 1 April 1980 at the age of 95.
Cooper achieved critical acclaim for her writings and paintings late in life but her creativity and intelligence was apparent from a very young age. Most of her education was carried out at home with the help of a governess. After completing high school in this manner, Cooper studied bookkeeping and business at the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy, St. John's. She worked as an office clerk and later as the matron of the Methodist Orphanage. During World War I she served as superintendent of a convalescing nursing home for injured servicemen. In 1920 at the age of 35, she graduated from the General Hospital School of Nursing.
After the nursing home closed, Cooper moved to Boston to begin post graduate work in nursing. Suffering from tuberculosis, she returned to St. John's where she entered the Sanatorium for treatment. It was during her illness that she wrote many of her poems, including "Evening at the Sanatorium."
For the rest of her life, Cooper was frail. Unable to continue nursing, she went to live with her sister Mina who operated a small boarding house on Parade Street. Cooper spent much of the 1930s painting watercolors, which were shown in the Newfoundland Art Club's exhibits. She continued to write as well, with her poems and short stories appearing in The Daily News, The Evening Telegram and The Newfoundland Quarterly, among others. In 1944, she won the O'Leary Prize for poetry with her poem "The Deserted Island."
In 1971, a group of Cooper's friends published a small book of her poems as a way to cheer her up when she became ill. The 600 copies of the sixteen page booklet entitled Down Aroun' Shore had sold out by 1976. In 1979 a seventy-eight page book The Deserted Island was published, largely due to the efforts of two of the Cooper sisters' former borders, Dr. Harry Cuff and Dr. Leslie Harris, faculty members of Memorial University. It featured 49 of Cooper's poems and 26 of her paintings. The poem "The Deserted Island" received much praise and has been printed in school textbooks in Manitoba, Ontario and Newfoundland. It is also featured in several anthologies of verse used in English courses at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
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Created - May 22, 2013
Language(s)
- English