Joan Adeney Easdale

Joan Adeney Easdale (23 January 1913 – 10 June 1998) was an English poet from Sevenoaks, Kent. Her mother was the author Gladys Ellen Easdale, née Adeney (1885–1970). Her father, Robert Carse Easdale, left her mother during the First World War.

Poetry and the Woolfs In January 1930, Easdale's mother Gladys sent examples of her daughter's poetry to the Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf described receiving "piles of dirty copy books written in a scrawl without any spelling, but I was taken aback to find, as I thought, some real merit... it may be a kind of infantile phosphorescence.... Very odd."

A Collection of Poems (1931) appeared as No. 19 in the series Hogarth Living Poets.

Life and family In July 1931 at the Wigmore Hall in London, Easdale recited some of her work to an accompaniment of piano music composed and played by her brother Brian Easdale. He had studied at the Royal College of Music, written his first opera at the age of 17, and was assisted by his friend Benjamin Britten. He also introduced his sister to the Scottish novelist and poet Naomi Mitchison, who had written the libretto for his opera The Corn King. Brian went on to write the music for an Oscar-winning film classic, The Red Shoes (1948).

Easdale herself later worked in London and published in the periodical The Adelphi. She was married in 1938 to the geneticist James Meadows Rendel, who was the grandson of Lytton Strachey's sister Dorothy Bussy, and the nephew of the Bloomsbury Group writer Frances Partridge. She bore her first child, Jane, in 1940. Stradivarius (1937), and Strange Things (1942). However, struggling with the demands of motherhood and increasingly discouraged by rejections from the BBC, she gradually withdrew from her writing career, as revealed in her correspondence with her friend, champion and mother of six Naomi Richardson.

Spells in Brighton and Dover were followed by a move to Nottingham, where she lived for the last 20 years of her life under an assumed name, Sophie or Sophia Curly, initially homeless and afterwards in a series of single-room council flats. The last was the Ash Lea Court retirement home. There she was intermittently visited by her children – Jane Susan Robertson, Polly Mary Virginia Woods, and Sandy Meadows Rendel – and grandchildren.