Born in Vändra, Estonia, as daughter of Estonian journalist and publisher Johann Voldemar Jannsen.
Lydia Emilie Florentine Jannsen, who would later become known by her literary pseudonym Koidula (meaning 'of the dawn'), was born on December 24, 1843, in the small town of Vändra in the Governorate of Livonia, then part of the Russian Empire (present-day Estonia).
She was the daughter of Johann Voldemar Jannsen, a pioneering Estonian-language journalist, teacher, and publisher who would become one of the most influential figures of the Estonian national awakening. Growing up in a household steeped in publishing and language activism gave Lydia early exposure to the power of the written word at a time when Estonian was largely considered a peasant language, subordinate to German and Russian.
Her birth is historically significant chiefly because of what she would become: the first major female poet to write in the Estonian language, and one of the most important cultural figures of the 19th-century Estonian national revival. Her upbringing under her father's tutelage in Pärnu and later Tartu shaped her into a fluent bilingual writer (Estonian and German) and set the stage for her later literary and journalistic career, which helped legitimize Estonian as a language of serious literature and public discourse during an era of tsarist Russification pressures and German-dominated cultural hierarchy in the Baltic provinces.
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