Annie Louisa Walker

Anna Louisa Walker (23 June 1836 – 7 July 1907) was an English and Canadian teacher and author. She wrote five novels and two collections of poetry and edited an autobiography. Her poem "The Night Cometh" provides the text of the popular hymn "Work, for the night is coming".

Early life and teaching Anna Louisa was born to Robert and Anna Walker on 23 June 1836 in Brewood, Staffordshire, England. She was the youngest of her father's nine children, although only her two brothers Thomas Andrew Walker and Charles were full siblings, the older ones being from her father's two previous marriages. who took the family to Pointe-Lévy, Lower Canada, about 1853, where he was employed on the Grand Trunk Railway. In 1858, the family relocated again, to Sarnia, Canada West. Soon after their arrival, Anna Louisa and her sisters Frances and Isabella founded a private girls' school. The school was only open a few years before the deaths of Frances and Isabella forced its closure.

Poetry Annie Louisa began publishing poems in newspapers and periodicals when she was a teenager. She put out an anonymous collection of them entitled Leaves from the Backwoods in 1861. This was printed in Montreal by John Lovell.

Return to England In 1863 or 1864, Annie Louisa accompanied her parents back to England, where her father died in September 1864, Oliphant was a successful writer, and encouraged Walker to write fiction rather than poetry, and recommended her works to publishers with which she already had contact. W. W. Tulloch's review in The Academy praised the story for its character development, descriptive language and wholesomeness, while criticising it for a somewhat stale and outdated style. Walker's fifth novel, Two Rival Lovers, followed in 1881. The family settled in Staffordshire.

Mrs Coghill published The Trial of Mary Broom; a Staffordshire Story, a sixth novel, in 1894.

She died on 7 July 1907 in Bath, England.

Selected works

In three volumes: Volume I Volume II Volume III In three volume: Volume I Volume II Volume III