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, pp. 144-53.
144-5

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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
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...
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...
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 ,...

Timeline

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Texts

Ridler, Anne. The Trial of Thomas Cranmer. Faber and Faber, 1956.
Ridler, Anne. Who is My Neighbour?; and, How Bitter the Bread. Faber and Faber, 1963.
Ridler, Anne. “Working for T.S. Eliot: A Personal Reminiscence”. Poetry Review, Vol.
73
, No. 1, pp. 46-9.