Frances Cornford

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Standard Name: Cornford, Frances
Birth Name: Frances Crofts Darwin
Married Name: Frances Crofts Cornford
Indexed Name: Frances Macdonald Cornford
Frances Cornford published nine books of poetry and three translations between 1910 and 1960. Her poems usually address the subjects of female lives lived by forced necessity apart from the busy, noisy main stream. Her early verse was widely popular and drew very positive critical attention, but her popularity waned in later years. Some critics accused her of simplification and naiveté, but this suggests an oversimplification in the critic rather than the poet. Her poems convey their meaning in sharp, slightly surreal, and often memorable images, and her treatment of tradition, and later of war and death, needs to be seen in part as ironizing her poems' cheery rhymes.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation May Cannan
MC was indeed, in Virginia Woolf 's phrase, one of the daughters of educated men.
Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. Hogarth Press, 1986.
16
Her parents were more educated than most: highly talented members of that ancient-university world into which another poet, Frances Cornford
Family and Intimate relationships Charles Darwin
This remarkable family produced several women writers. Julia Wedgwood was CD 's niece by marriage; his grand-daughters included the poet Frances Cornford and the artist and memoirist Gwen Raverat .
Family and Intimate relationships Jane Ellen Harrison
Apart from R. A. Neil , to whom Hope Mirrlees said she was engaged, Harrison was particularly close, in an emotional although a non-sexual way, to some of her other scholarly colleagues, Gilbert Murray and...
Friends, Associates Amy Levy
Others among her friends were Ellen Wordsworth Crofts , who later became the mother of the poet Frances Cornford , and Karl Pearson , mathematician, eugenicist, and founder of the Men and Women's Club .
Pullen, Christine. The Woman Who Dared: A Biography of Amy Levy. Kingston University Press, 2010.
115, 98
Friends, Associates Virginia Woolf
Early members of what VW called Old Bloomsbury (to distinguish the original members of the group from later additions) included Virginia and Vanessa Stephen , Leonard Woolf , Clive Bell , E. M. Forster ,...
Literary responses Rupert Brooke
Brooke's reputation quickly developed into icon status: he came to symbolise a generation of golden youth willingly and idealistically sacrificed. This image rested particularly on poems like his sonnet The Soldier, which looks forward...
Occupation Charles Baudelaire
Remembered largely for his poetry, whose early publication provoked a major crisis in censorship, CB also wrote important prose, especially criticism, and translated Edgar Allan Poe 's stories into French. As a literary and art...
Publishing Iris Murdoch
Topographical features of County Clare appear under invented names. IM used names from her family and forebears for her characters, but she insisted to her publishers that no reference to Ireland was to appear in...
Textual Features Philip Larkin
His selection was resolutely unfashionable, favouring Hardy and Betjeman at the expense of Eliot and Pound . He was, however, remarkably generous in his selection of women poets (often for just one or two poems...
Textual Features Fleur Adcock
She relates how in reading for the anthology she made discoveries and underwent conversions—one result of which had to be the jettisoning of some early choices whose phantoms later, for her, haunted the volume...
Textual Features Dorothy Wellesley
The contents are arranged in thirteen sections, from Romance and Poems on Love to Life and Death, War, and Night and Sleep. They come from twenty-seven poets, of whom only five are...
Textual Features Lady Margaret Sackville
This early anthology of poetry by women includes poems by Jane Barlow , Anna Bunston , Frances Cornford , Olive Custance , Michael Field (Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper ), Harriet Hamilton King
Textual Production Rupert Brooke
RB 's letters and papers are widely scattered in libraries and archives. Cambridge University Library holds his letters to his mother, to Frances Cornford , and to Gwen Raverat , among others.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Textual Production Sir James George Frazer
The Golden Bough, a comparative study of human beliefs from the earliest times, had a major influence on modernist writings. SJGF 's text outlines an evolving belief system, which moves from magic, to religion...
Textual Production Dorothy Wellesley
Under her editorship the list included Frances Cornford , Joan Adeney Easdale , Ida Graves , Vita Sackville-West , Margaret Thomas (as editor), Julian Bell , Cecil Day-Lewis , John Lehmann , F. L. Lucas

Timeline

1 January 1913: Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at...

Writing climate item

1 January 1913

Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury.
Fitzgerald, Penelope. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends. Collins, 1984, p. 240 pp.
142-9
Grant, Joy. Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967.
60, 81-3

16 January 1929: The Listener began publication; it has been...

Writing climate item

16 January 1929

The Listener began publication; it has been said that it did more for the new 'thirties poetry in Britain than any of the specialized poetry magazines.
BBC Handbook: 1960. BBC, 1960, http://U of A HSS HE 8690 B86.
144, 237
Dowson, Jane, editor. Women’s Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology. Routledge, 1996.
175
Hobsbawm, Eric John. “C (for Crisis)”. London Review of Books, Vol.
31
, No. 15, 6 Aug. 2009, pp. 12-13.
12
Wilmers, Mary-Kay. “Diary”. London Review of Books, Vol.
36
, No. 19, 9 Oct. 2014, p. 45.

By December 1952: Woodcut-engraver Gwen Raverat, née Darwin,...

Women writers item

By December 1952

Woodcut-engraver Gwen Raverat, née Darwin , published Period Piece, her extremely popular memoir of her Victorian childhood in Cambridge; by 1975 it had sold 120,000 copies in Britain alone.
Beard, Mary. “Sun and Strawberries”. London Review of Books, 19 Sept. 2002, pp. 13-14.
13

Texts

Cornford, Frances, and Eric Gill. Autumn Midnight. Poetry Bookshop, 1923.
Cornford, John, and Frances Cornford. “Chronology and Introduction”. Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound, edited by Jonathan Galassi, Carcanet New Press, 1976, pp. 9-17.
Cornford, Frances. Collected Poems. Cresset Press, 1954.
Cornford, Frances. Death and the Princess. Bowes and Bowes, 1912.
Cornford, Frances. Different Days. Hogarth Press, 1928.
Fifteen Poems, from the French. Translator Cornford, Frances, Tragara Press, 1976.
Cornford, Hugh et al. “Frances Cornford 1886-1960”. Selected Poems, edited by Jane Dowson and Jane Dowson, Enitharmon Press, 1996, p. xxvii - xxxvii.
Dowson, Jane et al. “Introduction”. Selected Poems, edited by Jane Dowson and Jane Dowson, Enitharmon Press, 1996, p. xiii - xxv.
Cornford, Frances, and Gwen Raverat. Mountains and Molehills. Cambridge University Press, 1934.
Cornford, Frances, and Christopher Cornford. On a Calm Shore. Saint Nicolas Press, 1960.
Cornford, Frances. Poems. The Priory Press, 1910.
Poems from the Russian. Translators Cornford, Frances and Esther Polianowsky Salaman, Faber and Faber, 1943.
Cornford, Frances, and Gwen Raverat. Spring Morning. Poetry Bookshop, 1915.
Eluard, Paul, and Marc Chagall. The Dour Desire to Endure. Translators Spender, Stephen and Frances Cornford, The Trianon Press, 1950.
Cornford, Frances, and Christopher Cornford. Travelling Home. Cresset Press, 1948.
Bliss, Arthur, and Frances Cornford. Two Nursery Rhymes. J. And W. Chester, 1921.
Cornford, John, and Frances Cornford. Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound. Editor Galassi, Jonathan, Carcanet New Press, 1976.