Frances Bellerby

Who was Frances Bellerby?

Mary Eirene Frances Bellerby was an English poet.

Born in Bristol, Frances Bellerby was a clergyman's daughter, and lost her only brother in the First World War. Having worked as a teacher and journalist, she married John Rotherford Bellerby, a Cambridge academic, in 1929. Her 1932 novel, Shadowy Bricks, refers to the social and educational experiments carried out by the couple. They separated permanently in 1942, and Frances Bellerby became a serious poet. She settled in Cornwall and later in Devon, producing poetry, short stories, and another novel. During the 1950s she learned she was suffering from breast cancer, but she survived another twenty years, though in poor physical and mental health. Her papers are now held by the library of the University of Exeter. She has written many poems her one of the most famous poems was Voices.

Frances Bellerby, poet, novelist and short story writer, was born in 1899, the daughter of an Anglo-Catholic curate in a poor working-class parish of East Bristol. She was educated at Mortimer House School, Clifton and in her twenties worked as a kennel-maid, taught English, Latin and games, tutored, and had a staff job in the London office of the Bristol Times and Mirror. In 1929 she married the economist John Rotherford Bellerby; after an accident in 1930 and recurrent ill-health she remained a semi-invalid until her death in 1975.