Anne Ridler

'The Observer' described Anne Ridler as 'one of the best poets of her generation.' Her first book, 'Poems', was published in 1939, and her work developed in the light and shadow of the poets of the day - MacNeice and Auden, but also Durrell and Watkins. As important to her was an affinity with the secular and devotional writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ambitious for her poems, she was never ambitious for reputation. Her work, like that of her friend E.J. Scovell, is only now receiving the attention it deserves. She has published ten collections of poetry, original and translated opera libretti, including Monteverdi's 'Orfeo'. She is the author of verse plays which have been performed in Oxford and London. This volume contains all that she wishes to preserve of her lyric poetry, together with choruses from the play 'The Trial of Thomas Cranmer'and a masque for music by Elizabeth Maconchy, 'The Jesse Tree'.

Born in 1912, Anne Ridler was educated at Downe House School, in Italy, and at King's College, London. She worked on the editorial staff at Faber and Faber for a time as assistant to T.S. Eliot, and later as a freelance reader. She is married to Vivian Ridler, who was Printer to the University of Oxford 1958-1978.