Who is My Neighbour? and How Bitter the Bread. [Plays]

First edition, signed by author, 8vo. (222x144mm), pp: [i-viii], 9-87.[1], half title, with book labels of Simon Nowell-Smith & Judith Adams Nowell-Smith pasted to front pastedown endpaper. Inscribed 'Anne Ridler/Easter 1963' beneath half title, with loosely inserted typed poem 'Thaw' inscribed for Jean & Tom, with Easter greetings from Anne; and a 2 line grammatical note beneath, in maroon cloth, spine gilt lettered in dustwrapper sl. worn to extremeties, otherwise very good. Anne Ridler, poet, librettist & biographer whose early work was championed by Eliot. It was her husband Vivian Ridler, a typographer and printer, who printed her first volume, 'Poems' (1939), for Oxford University Press, using a small press which he was managing in Bunhill Row, London EC1. The whole stock was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1940. She also turned to verse plays, under the influence (but not at the suggestion) of Eliot. Eliot's producer, Martin Browne, had turned his actors into the Pilgrim Players, who toured villages and towns which would otherwise have been denied theatre during the war. Ridler offered her own work to them, and her first play 'The Shadow Factory: A Nativity Play' was subsequently performed at the Mercury theatre in 1945, and published in 1946. Half a dozen other verse dramas were performed in Oxford and London. She was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2000 and was awarded the Cholmondeley award for poetry at the Royal Society of Authors by Michael Palin. Her poetry was in every anthology of the 1940s. Earlier in her life she mixed with Lawrence Durrell, WH Auden, Dylan Thomas and worked with TSEliot.