Minnie Louise Haskins born 12 May 1875, Bitton, Gloucestershire, died 1957 was an academic in the fields of sociology and philosophy.
Her father was Joseph Haskins and her mother was Louisa Bridges.
Haskins taught from 1919 to 1939 and 1940 to 1944[1] at the London School of Economics, where previously she had herself been a student. Her nationality was British and her teaching career at the LSE began at the end of the First World War and ended just before the close of the Second World War.
Despite being principally an academic, Haskins enjoyed writing poetry, and in 1908 (as part of a collection named 'The Desert') her poem God Knows, more popularly known as The Gate of the Year, was published. It is amongst the most quoted poetic works of the twentieth century, and its words are engraved on the entrance to the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle.
The poem and her life story were featured in the BBC Radio 4 programme Adventures in Poetry [2] on 19 and 25 Dec 2010.
The poem has been set to music by Canadian composer Eleanor Joanne Daley.
Haskins was English[3], despite various sources reporting erroneously that Haskins was American[4] or even Canadian.[5]