May Wedderburn Cannan (1893-1973) was born and educated in Oxford, where she also trained in first aid at the outbreak of the First World War. She had a diverse experience of the conflict, working with the Oxford Voluntary Aid Detachment, the Clarendon Press, in a railway canteen in France, and at the bureau of central intelligence in Paris, all of which gave rise to her first volume of poetry, In War Time (1917). After surviving the war itself, Cannan's fiance Bevil Quiller-Couch succumbed to the Spanish Influenza in February 1919, and her grief was channelled into the second volume of poetry, dedicated to him, The Splendid Days (1919).

Cannan married Percival James Slater in July 1924 after recieving his letter of praise for her third volume of poetry, The House of Hope (1923). They had one son, James Cannan Slater in 1926. It seems Cannan's second husband discouraged her writing, and subsequently she focussed on their Staffordshire farm until writing her autobiography, Grey Ghosts and Voices, which was published posthumously in 1976.