Chesson, Eleanor (‘Nora’) (née Hopper ) (1871–1906), poet and writer, was born 2 January 1871 at 8 Radnor Place, St Leonards, Devon, the daughter of Captain Harman Baillie Hopper, an Irish officer retired from the 31st Bengal native infantry, and Caroline Augusta Francis, who was Welsh. In 1871 Captain Hopper died, and Nora and her mother moved to London, where they lived in Kensington before settling in Notting Hill. She was educated at Cumberland House, South Kensington, where she was instructed primarily in painting. Nora began writing poetry at an early age, and in 1887 had her first poem published in the Family Herald. She subsequently became a prolific contributor of poems and stories to a variety of journals, among them the National Observer, Pilot, and the Yellow Book. Her work was in the style of the emerging Celtic twilight manner, though it seems she never lived in Ireland. With the publication of her volume of stories and poems Ballads in prose (1894) she attracted the attention of W. B. Yeats (qv), who described it as possessing ‘the beauty of a dim twilight’ (Bookman). Though he initially supported her work, he was also conscious that her writing bore marked similarities to his own and that of Katharine Tynan (qv). Regarding her poetry as ‘plagiarisms of inexperienced enthusiasm’, he commented in a letter to his sister Lily Yeats (qv) that the volume ‘can only be of help to foster a taste for our Celtic wares’. Her collection Under quicken boughs (1896) again demonstrated a Celtic revival influence, but also showed classical inspiration. She read at ‘original nights’ of the Irish Literary Society in London, and was reported to possess ‘an exquisitely modulated voice’ (MacManus, 5).
On 5 March 1901 she married the writer (Wilfrid) Hugh Chesson, and they settled at Childwall, 337 Sandycombe Road, North Sheen, Surrey. They had three children: Ann Caroline Spry (b. 1902), Dermot (b. 1904), and Dagmar (b. 1906). Chesson maintained a prodigious literary output, continuing to publish verse in the collections Aquamarines (1902) and Dirge for Aoine and other poems (1906), but also contributing poems and reviews to periodicals including Folklore, the Celt, and New Ireland Review and writing children's fiction for the Girls’ Own Paper and Atalanta. She was assisted by George Moore (qv) in the writing of a libretto for O'Brien Butler's opera Murgheis (The sea swan), based on Irish mythology, which was performed in the Theatre Royal in Dublin in December 1903. Around 1904–5 her husband suffered a nervous breakdown, and it seems that financial necessity forced her to turn her hand to novel-writing: The bell and the arrow, a love story set in an English village, appeared in 1905. In this year, supported by G. K. Chesterton and E. V. Lucas, Chesson made a successful application to the Royal Literary Fund, on the proceeds of which she paid a brief visit to Ireland in September 1905. She returned to Surrey where, soon after the birth of her second daughter, she died 14 April 1906 of puerperal fever.