Lizzie Berry

Lizzie Berry (1847 – 1919) was a prolific writer of devotional and social protest poetry.

Life
She was born Elizabeth Marshall in Great Bowden, Leicestershire, to working-class parents, labourer Jeremiah Marshall and his wife Elizabeth, a dressmaker.

Her first husband was John Archie Berry, a plasterer, whom she married on 29 October 1866 in Islington, London. They lost one son in infancy and had two surviving sons, Archie and Frank.

After John Berry’s death, she married her second husband, Edmund Kemp, a railway signalman. They had a daughter and two sons. The marriage was unhappy and, by 1891, she had separated from him and returned to Great Bowden under her former name, Lizzie Berry. She maintained her children by her income from dressmaking and supplying poems to newspapers. She was able to cover the rent of her cottage between 1880 and 1918 by supplying poems to the Wharfedale and Airedale Observer at the rate of almost one per week.

Her Berry sons predeceased her and her Kemp sons emigrated to Canada. She died in the Spanish flu epidemic on 13 July 1919 at her home in Great Bowden.

Poetry
Berry’s poetry was published by the Midland Times and the Wharfedale and Airedale Observer, and collected in Heart Echoes (269 poems, 1886) and Day Dreams (257 poems, 1893), as well as other volumes published privately or by the Midland Times. The volumes were popular and went through multiple editions, although her popularity did not outlive her.

Her poetry combined elements of the street ballad as well as lyric poetry. O’Brien calls it "poetry with a complication of conventional registers [which] inflects religious devotion with a fierce and often idiosyncratic feminism…" She criticises the physical and moral deformity and exploitation of workers caused by the fashion industry (“Fashion”), takes a cynical approach to lower-class women’s work in marriage (“A Woman’s Answer”), and encourages sympathy towards prostitutes (“Pass Her By!”).