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Anne Ridler | |
|---|---|
| Born | Anne Barbara Bradby 30 July 1912 Rugby, Warwickshire, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | 15 October 2001 (aged 88) |
| Education | Downe House School,King's College, London |
| Occupation(s) | Poet, playwright/dramatist, and editor |
| Spouse | Vivian Ridler |
| Family |
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Anne Barbara RidlerOBE (néeBradby) (30 July 1912 – 15 October 2001) was a British poet andFaber and Faber editor, selecting the FaberA Little Book of Modern Verse withT. S. Eliot (1941). HerCollected Poems (Carcanet Press) were published in 1994. She turned tolibretto work andverse plays; it was later in life that she earned official recognition, receiving anOBE in 2001.[1]
Ridler was the daughter ofHenry Bradby, housemaster atRugby School inRugby, Warwickshire, England, where she was born. Her mother, Violet Bradby, born Milford, wrote popular children's stories and was the sister ofHumphrey S. Milford, Publisher to theUniversity of Oxford.[2] One of her great-grandfathers wasCharles Richard Sumner,Bishop of Winchester, a brother ofJohn Bird Sumner,Archbishop of Canterbury. Her uncle,G. F. Bradby, was the author ofThe Lanchester Tradition (1919), while her auntBarbara Bradby was the joint author ofThe Village Labourer (1911). Her cousins includedLetitia Chitty, structural analytical engineer and first female fellow of theRoyal Aeronautical Society,[3] composerRobin Milford and the Rev. Dick Milford, vicar of theUniversity Church of St Mary the Virgin,Oxford.[4]
Anne Bradby was educated atDowne House School and later published a biography of her headmistress,Olive Willis. After six months inFlorence andRome, she took a diploma in journalism atKing's College London.
In 1938, she marriedVivian Ridler, the future Printer toOxford University (1958–78), but then the manager of the Bunhill Press,London, and they had 4 children.
She editedCharles Williams: The Image of the City and other Essays (1958) andCharles Williams: Selected Writings (1961). A Christian and friend and correspondent ofC. S. Lewis, she was on the edge of theInklings group. Also closely associated with T. S. Eliot, she wrote a short but powerful poem, "I Who am Here Dissembled", full of allusions to images in Eliot's own poems, for theanthologyT. S. Eliot: A Symposium in honour of his sixtieth birthday.[5]
For a short time in the 1940s, Ridler was also a successful verse dramatist, writing such plays asCain (1943) andShadow Factory: A Nativity Play (1945).
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse awarded her in 1954 the Oscar Blumenthal Prize and in 1955 the Union League Civic and Arts Poetry Prize. In 1998 she was one of four poets who received theCholmondeley Award from theSociety of Authors.[6]
