Anne Ridler

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Standard Name: Ridler, Anne
Birth Name: Anne Barbara Bradby
Married Name: Anne Barbara Ridler
AR was a twentieth-century poet and verse playwright whose work has been called metaphysical. She also edited and wrote introductions and commentary for literary works by others, produced translations of opera libretti, and left memoirs which were published after her death. Writing about personal experiences (including childbirth), about her faith, and about public or political concerns (much of her earlier poetry is filled with dread and darkness connected with the two World Wars), she links this world closely with her belief in God. AR creates a meditative quality in her poems through complexly structured metaphor. Critic Kathleen Morgan comments that she writes as one who experienced the happiest of family relationships. . . . and her life within that of the family is related to the larger life of the individual child of God.
Morgan, Kathleen. “’The Holiness of the Heart’s Affections’: Poetry of Anne Ridler”. Christian Themes in Contemporary Poets, SCM Press, 1965, pp. 144-53.
144-5

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization E. J. Scovell
EJS has been much anthologised: in Geoffrey Grigson 's Poetry of the Present: An Anthology of the Thirties and After, 1949, and more recently in collections edited by Fleur Adcock , Philip Larkin ,...
Education Constance Naden
CN received her first education at home, where her grandmother taught her to read using the method of Reading without Tears (a book by Favell Lee Bevan, later Mrs Mortimer ), whereby whole words were...
Family and Intimate relationships Lucy Walford
Catherine Sinclair , a children's writer and novelist, was LW 's great-aunt (the younger sister, by a second marriage, of her maternal grandmother). LW praised Sinclair's work in Recollections of a Scottish Novelist: Catherine...
Friends, Associates Anne Stevenson
In Oxford AS met a number of other poets: John Wain , Anne Ridler , Elizabeth Jennings , Anne Born , Andrew Motion , Craig Raine , Peter Levi , and Anne Pennington , who died a few years later.
Contemporary Authors, Autobiography Series. Gale Research, 1984.
9: 284
Friends, Associates Anne Stevenson
AS 's close friends have included many well-known late twentieth-century names in British poetry: Frances Horovitz , whom she mourned in a number of poems, a trio of drinking friends in Glasgow (Tom Leonard
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Jennings
She had a remarkably catholic talent for friendship. During her student days she became a friend of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis . Her correspondents at this and later periods of her life included her...
Friends, Associates E. J. Scovell
Her friends included a fellow Oxford poet, Anne Ridler (who later wrote her entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), and a younger novelist, Maggie Gee (whose brother married EJS 's niece), and...
Intertextuality and Influence Catherine Sinclair
Holiday House was an important book for one of CS 's great-nieces, who became the popular writer Lucy Walford , and was among the favourite childhood reading of poet and playwright Anne Ridler .
Walford, Lucy. Recollections of a Scottish Novelist. Williams and Norgate, 1910.
18-19
Leisure and Society William Empson
Anne Ridler later remembered him at a poetry reading in October 1943 at the Wigmore Hall in London, held in support of Aid to China and of the National Council for Women . While...
Literary responses T. S. Eliot
Anne Ridler calls this Eliot's finest play.
Ridler, Anne. Memoirs. The Perpetua Press, 2004, p. 240 pp.
125
Literary responses Philip Larkin
Ten years after his first collection appeared, this one at last brought PL admiration and respect. The Times Literary Supplement called him a poet of quite exceptional importance, and The Times picked the volume as...
Occupation T. S. Eliot
Eliot now left Lloyds Bank . His most significant work apart from his own writing was his long career in publishing, which made him a mentor to a whole series of distinguished authors. From late...
Textual Features Germaine Greer
The selection of poets is highly informed. It reaches back in time before GG 's anthology Kissing the Rod, to Anne Askew and Isabella Whitney , and forward to Carol Ann Duffy and Margaret Atwood
Textual Features Germaine Greer
Women are a minority here, but well represented: Fleur Adcock , Anna Letitia Barbauld , Amy Clampitt , Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas) , Emily Dickinson , Freda Downie , U. A. Fanthorpe , Vicki Feaver
Textual Production T. S. Eliot
It was an inauspicious time for an opening, because of gathering war-clouds. Anne Ridler later wrote, it was a great pity that Eliot had refused to offer the part [of Harry, the pivotal character] to...

Timeline

1907
Educationalist Olive Willis founded a school for girls at Downe House in Kent, formerly occupied by Charles Darwin . Downe House School began with one pupil, five teachers, and no financial backing.
Early 1936
The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts (who was put forward for this task by T. S. Eliot ), set out to define the modern movement, not just chronologically but according...

Texts

Ridler, Anne. A Dream Observed, And Other Poems. Poetry, 1941.
Ridler, Anne. A Matter of Life and Death. Faber and Faber, 1959.
Ridler, Anne. A Measure of English Poetry. Perpetua, 1991.
Ridler, Anne. Cain. Nicholson and Watson, 1943.
Ridler, Anne. Collected Poems. Carcanet, 1994.
da Ponte, Lorenzo, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Cosi fan tutte Libretto. Translator Ridler, Anne, Perpetua, 1987.
Ridler, Anne. Dies Natalis. Perpetua, 1980.
Ridler, Anne. Henry Bly, and Other Plays. Faber and Faber, 1950.
Ridler, Anne. Memoirs. The Perpetua Press, 2004, p. 240 pp.
Ridler, Anne. New and Selected Poems. Faber and Faber, 1988.
Ridler, Anne, editor. Notes on the Taliessin Poems of Charles Williams. Charles Williams Society, 1991.
Ridler, Anne. Olive Willis and Downe House. John Murray, 1967.
Ridler, Anne. “Open House”. Cathedrals, Winchester College Printing Society, 1979.
Ridler, Anne. Poems. Oxford University Press, 1939.
Jennings, Elizabeth, and Anne Ridler. Poems. Fantasy Press, 1953.
Ridler, Anne, editor. Poems and some Letters of James Thomson. Centaur, 1963.
Ridler, Anne. Selected Poems. Macmillan, 1961.
Ridler, Anne, editor. Shakespeare Criticism 1919-1935. Oxford University Press, 1936.
Ridler, Anne. Some Time After. Faber and Faber, 1972.
Ridler, Anne. The Golden Bird. Faber and Faber, 1951.
Ridler, Anne, and John Piper. The Jesse Tree. Lyrebird Press, 1972.
Eliot, T. S. The Little Book of Modern Verse. Editor Ridler, Anne, Faber and Faber, 1941.
Ridler, Anne. The Nine Bright Shiners. Faber and Faber, 1943.
Monteverdi, Claudio. The Operas of Monteverdi. Translator Ridler, Anne, Calder, 1992.
Ridler, Anne. The Shadow Factory. Faber and Faber, 1946.