From Darwin to Cornford - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This study presents the first sustained account of the life and work of the poet Frances Cornford (1886-1960). Scholars from across disciplines reveal her journey, as she navigated the scientific inheritance of her grandfather Charles Darwin, the patriarchal world of the University of Cambridge, and the demands of dominant poetry movements, through times of personal loss and depression. The volume brings renewed attention to Frances's poetry from across her career, draws on previously-unseen manuscripts and photographs, and curates her memoir. Frances became a widely-read poet, winning the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1959.

Review Quotes

"A stellar group of highly accomplished authors has been assembled to write about Frances Cornford. I came to know Frances Cornford when I attended her small "at homes" when I was a student at Cambridge in the 1950s; I subsequently was the co-author of a biographical study of her son John. This book will make her deservedly more recognised, as a wonderful poet; but it also provides important insights into English intellectual and literary "aristocracy", through the study of her life as a Darwin, as a close friend of Rupert Brooke and the Neo-Pagan circle, and as Francis Cornford's wife. It is also an important personal story, sadly because of her periods of deep depression, more positively as she moves from atheism to deep religiosity."
- Peter Stansky, Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus, Stanford University

"A book that is dear to my heart." - Jonathan Galassi, Chairman and Executive Director, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and editor of Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound: Selected Writings of John Cornford.

"[...] What emerges is a picture of a poet with an abiding love of Cambridge, where she grew up, who turned her back on Victorian pieties, writing instead in closely-observed direct and simple diction about nature, motherhood and everyday domestic experiences that reflected the changing experiences of girls and women and the anxieties and tensions of her day.
[...] There is an impressively well-researched chapter on Frances Cornford's religious life and her agnosticism and a wonderful discussion of the visual arts, copiously illustrated with Frances Cornford's early watercolours. However, I expect that the highlight of this edited collection for many readers will be the extracts from Frances's hitherto unpublished autobiographical fragment which makes it possible for us to hear the poet's own voice anew and respond to her own words. [...]
I warmly recommend From Darwin to Cornford as an excellent work of reference"
- Mary Joannou, Emerita Professor Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and Chelmsford

About the Author

Jane Firman is an independent research scholar, writer, mentor, and entrepreneur. She was made honorary niece to Frances Cornford's son, Christopher Cornford, in 1992, and received two books of his mother's poems (Travelling Home and Collected Poems) from him shortly afterwards, thus beginning Jane's interest in Frances Cornford and her poetry. Jane holds two degrees from the University of Cambridge: an MA in English Literature and a Master's in History.

Peter Maber is Associate Professor and Head of English, Creative and Academic Writing at Northeastern University London. He writes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and drama and has published articles in the journals Word & Image, Arizona Quarterly, and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry; and in the books After Thirty Falls: New Essays on John Berryman (Rodopi, 2007), Spaces of the Book (Peter Lang, 2015), and Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration (Bloomsbury, 2024). He also writes regularly on art for the Times Literary Supplement.