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Frances Cornford

Frances Crofts Cornford (née Darwin; 30 March 1886 – 19 August 1960) was an English poet.

Biography

She was the daughter of the botanist Francis Darwin and Newnham College fellow Ellen Wordsworth Crofts (1856–1903), and born into the Darwin–Wedgwood family. She was a granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin. Her older half-brother was the golf writer Bernard Darwin. She was brought up in Cambridge, among a dense social network of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and was educated privately. Because of the similarity of her first name, her father's and her husband's, she was known to her family before her marriage as "FCD" and after her marriage as "FCC" and her husband Francis Cornford was known as "FMC". Her father Sir Francis Darwin, a son of Charles Darwin, yet another 'Francis', was known to their family as "Frank", or as "Uncle Frank".

She died of heart failure at her home in Cambridge, on 19 August 1960. She is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge, where she is in the same grave as her father Sir Francis Darwin. Her mother Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, née Crofts, is buried in St Andrew's churchyard in Girton, Cambridgeshire.

Personal life

In 1909, Frances Darwin married Francis Cornford, a classicist and poet. They had five children:

  • Helena Cornford (1913–1996); married Joseph L. Henderson in 1934
  • John Cornford (1915–1936), a poet and Communist who was killed in the Spanish Civil War
  • Christopher Cornford (1917–1993), an artist and writer
  • Hugh Wordsworth Cornford (1921–1997), medical doctor
  • Ruth Clare (1924–1992); married Cecil Hall Chapman, the son of Sydney Chapman in 1947.

Works

Frances Cornford published several books of verse, including her debut (as "F.C.D"), The Holtbury Idyll (1908), Poems (1910), Spring Morning (1915), Autumn Midnight (1923), and Different Days (1928). Mountains and Molehills (1935) was illustrated with woodcuts by her cousin Gwen Raverat.

She wrote poems including "The Guitarist Tunes Up":

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One of Frances Cornford's poems was a favourite of Philip Larkin and his lover Maeve Brennan. "All Souls' Night" uses the superstition that a dead lover will appear to a still faithful partner on that November date. Maeve, many years after Larkin's death, would re-read the poem on All Souls:

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Although the myth enhances the poem, it can be read as the meeting of older, former lovers.

"To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train"

Cornford is possibly best remembered for her triolet poem "To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train" in Poems of 1910. <blockquote></blockquote>

To which G. K. Chesterton replied in "The Fat Lady Answers", in his Collected Poems of 1927: <blockquote></blockquote>

Earlier, in 1910, A. E. Housman had written a parody in a private letter: <blockquote></blockquote>

The first lines of this poem were spoken by a character in Agatha Christie's 1939 novel Murder is Easy.

Elizabeth Goudge quotes the poem "The Country Bedroom" in her autobiography, The Joy of the Snow at the end of Chap XIV, p 252, when Goudge is describing finding her final home "Rose Cottage".

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See also

Notes

External links