University of Virginia Library

"My Beautiful Lady" and "Of my Lady In Death" were probably some of Woolner's first poems, written at the urging of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He later revised and included them in his three-part sequence My Beautiful Lady, first published by Macmillan in 1863. It went through two more editions (1864 and 1866) and was also included in a combined edition, My Beautiful Lady and Nelly Dale, published in 1887 as volume 82 of Cassell's National Library.

According to Ormond, these two early poems have "a deliberate and often delightful naivete of style which was abandoned in [Woolner's] more mature poetry" (Tennyson and Thomas Woolner, 1981).