A. E. Coppard

Biography

Alfred Edgar Coppard was born January 4, 1878, in the town of Folkestone--a port town in Kent, England. Coppard was the oldest of four children and the only son. His mother had been a housemaid, his father was a journeyman tailor, and he wrote that his childhood was “shockingly poor” (Coppard). His early life took place in a two-room house. Following his father’s death, when Coppard was around age nine, he had to leave school and begin working in order to help support his mother and three sisters. He married his first wife at the age of 27 and moved to Oxford for work. After she died, he married again and had a son and daughter. In 1919, he left the world of business to become a writer and struggled for several months before finally selling a story to an American magazine. He did write poetry, but his short stories are what made him famous. He died of a heart attack at the age of 79.

Because of his childhood in poverty, Coppard often wrote about the oppressed and down-trodden in society. He also frequently wrote from a female perspective—a novelty in the literature of the time. Both of these elements appear in his story “The Hurly-Burly.” His love for the short story was influenced by contemporaries like Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, Checkov, and Thomas Hardy.