Ruth Collie (1888–1936) was an English-born poet who wrote as Wilhelmina Stitch, one of the most widely read popular versifiers of the interwar years. She was born Ruth Jacobs in Cambridge in November 1888, the eldest of three children of a bookseller and an accountant, and a granddaughter of Marcus Hast, the Hebrew composer who spent forty years at the Great Synagogue of London. In 1908 she married the lawyer Elisha Arakie Cohen and settled with him in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where their son Ralph — later a noted professor of economics — was born in 1910. From 1913 she wrote book reviews for the Winnipeg Telegram under the pen name Sheila Rand, becoming an editor there by 1917, and in 1919 joined the Winnipeg Tribune with a column of reviews and verse. After her first husband's death that year she wrote advertising copy for Eaton's while continuing at the Tribune and serving as literary editor of Western Home Monthly, and she was elected vice-president of the Canadian Authors' Association. In 1922 she arranged to syndicate her poetry across North American newspapers and took the name Wilhelmina Stitch. She moved to England in 1923 for her son's education and in 1924 married the Scottish physician Frank Collie. Her daily verse for the London Daily Graphic earned her the nickname the poem-a-day lady, and in 1930 she toured North America, speaking on fifty consecutive days. Her collections, all published as Wilhelmina Stitch, include The Fragrant Minute for Every Day (1925), Silken Threads (1927), Homespun, Joy's Loom, Silver Linings and The Golden Web (all 1928), Where Sunlight Falls (1929), Tapestries (1931), Catching the Gleam (1932), the six-volume Wilhelmina Stitch Booklets (1934), and Women of the Bible (1935). The verse is short, plain, and consoling, drawn from domestic and everyday life — a bus conductor, a patchwork quilt, spring cleaning, a child blowing bubbles — and it was enormously popular with newspaper readers while attracting little critical regard. She died on 6 March 1936 after a brief illness, aged forty-seven, and was cremated at Golders Green, where a plaque commemorates her under her pen name.
180 works on Textopian