Augusta Webster was born Augusta Davies in 1837, the daughter of a naval officer. She spent part of her early childhood aboard her father's ship, before schooling in Scotland and at Cambridge School of Art. She taught herself Greek, Italian and Spanish, and learned to speak French while living in Paris and Geneva. She later became a respected translator of works by Aeschylus and Euripides. Her first collections of poetry, Blanche Lisle and other poems (1860) and Lilian Gray (1864) were published under the name of Cecil Home. In 1863 she married Thomas Webster, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Their only child was the subject of her sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895). Her major works took the form of dramatic monlogues: Dramatic Studies (1866), A Woman Sold and other poems (1867) and Portraits (1870); she also wrote a novel and verse dramas. She became active in the movement for improvements in girls' education and for women's suffrage, and published essays on politics and women's rights. She died in 1894.