Anne Ridler

Anne Barbara Ridler OBE (née Bradby) (30 July 1912 – 15 October 2001) was a British poet and Faber and Faber editor, selecting the Faber A Little Book of Modern Verse with T. S. Eliot. Her Collected Poems (Carcanet Press) were published in 1994. She turned to libretto work and verse plays; it was later in life that she earned official recognition, receiving an OBE in 2001.

Early life Anne Barbara Bradby was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, England on 30 July 1912. She was the daughter of Henry Bradby, housemaster at Rugby School. Her mother, Violet Bradby, born Milford, wrote popular children's stories and was the sister of Humphrey S. Milford, Publisher to the University of Oxford. One of her great-grandfathers was Charles Richard Sumner, Bishop of Winchester, a brother of John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury. Her uncle, G. F. Bradby, was the author of The Lanchester Tradition (1919), while her aunt Barbara Bradby was the joint author of The Village Labourer (1911). Her cousins included Letitia Chitty, structural analytical engineer and first female fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, composer Robin Milford and the Rev. Dick Milford, vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford.

Life Anne Bradby was educated at Downe House School and later published a biography of her headmistress, Olive Willis. After six months in Florence and Rome, she took a diploma in journalism at King's College London in 1932.

For a short time in the 1940s, Ridler was also a successful verse dramatist, writing such plays as Cain (1943) and Shadow Factory: A Nativity Play (1945). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse awarded her in 1954 the Oscar Blumenthal Prize and in 1955 the Union League Civic and Arts Poetry Prize. In 1998 she was one of four poets who received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors.

Ridler wrote the libretti to two operas by Elizabeth Maconchy, The Jesse Tree (1970) and The King of the Golden River (1975).

Ridler died on 15 October 2001.