ABSTRACT
Sara Coleridge (1802–52) was the youngest of Coleridge’s children to survive into adulthood and his only daughter. Sara remained in closest touch with her father, both by predisposition and because in 1829 she married Henry Nelson Coleridge, her first-cousin and an ardent disciple of Coleridge. The two of them co-operated in editing Coleridge’s work after his death and the 1847 edition of the Biographia is the fruit of their collaboration. Sara compiled a groundbreaking collection of Coleridge’s journalism, the Essays on his Own Times forming a Second Series of The Friend, published in 1850 in three lengthy volumes. Unwilling herself to delineate the many difficult circumstances of Coleridge’s life and feeling that it would do his memory no good however delicately she might approach the task, Sara was determined to help people understand him.
