Ursula Askham Fanthorpe, CBE, FRSL (22 July 1929 – 28 April 2009) was an English poet, who published as U. A. Fanthorpe. Her poetry comments mainly on social issues.Wife R.V. "Rosie" Bailey
Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Cheltenham Ladies' College, Bayshill Rd, Cheltenham GL50 3EP
Culverhay House, Culverhay, Wotton-under-Edge GL12 7LS, UK
St. Mary the Virgin Churchyard
Wotton-under-Edge, Stroud District, Gloucestershire, England
Ursula Askham Fanthorpe, CBE, FRSL (22 July 1929 – 28 April 2009) was an English poet, who published as U. A. Fanthorpe. Her poetry comments mainly on social issues.
Ursula Askham Fanthorpe was born in south-east London, the daughter of a judge,[1] or as she put it "middle-class but honest parents".[2] She was educated at St Catherine's School, Bramley in Surrey, and at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she "came to life,"[2] receiving a first-class degree in English language and literature. She taught English at Cheltenham Ladies' College for 16 years, but then left teaching for jobs as a secretary, receptionist and hospital clerk in Bristol – in her poems, she later remembered some of the patients for whose records she had been responsible.[3] Fanthorpe's first volume of poetry, Side Effects (1978), has been said to "unsentimentally recover the invisible lives and voices of psychiatric patients."[2] She was "Writer-in-Residence" at St Martin's College, Lancaster (now the University of Cumbria) in 1983–1985, and later Northern Arts Fellow at Durham Newcastle universities.[4][5] Her 1984 volume Voices Off explores student life, critical vocabulary, and the finding that "naming is power."[2] Her most famous poem is probably Atlas, which opens, "There is a kind of love called maintenance." In 1987 Fanthorpe went freelance, giving readings around the country and occasionally abroad. In 1994 she was nominated for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry.[6] Her nine collections of poems were published by Peterloo Poets. Her Collected Poems was published in 2005. Many of her poems bring in two voices. In her readings the other voice is that of the Bristol academic and teacher R.V. "Rosie" Bailey, Fanthorpe's life partner of 44 years. The couple co-wrote a collection of poems, From Me To You: love poems, illustrated by Nick Wadley and published in 2007 by Enitharmon.[7] Both became Quakers in the 1980s.[8]
U.A. Fanthorpe; Rosie Bailey
by Jemimah Kuhfeld
bromide print, July 2006
11 3/8 in. x 15 3/8 in. (290 mm x 392 mm) image size
Purchased, 2009
Photographs Collection
NPG x133081
Fanthorpe was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was made CBE in 2001 for services to poetry. In 2003 she received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Among many other awards and honours she was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Letters) from the University of Bath.[10]
Fanthorpe died of cancer aged 79 on 28 April 2009, in a hospice near her home in Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire.[6][9]
My published books:
