Fredegond Shove

Who was Fredegond Shove?

Fredegond Shove was an English poet.

Fredegond was the daughter of the legal historian Frederic William Maitland and his wife Florence Henrietta Fisher. She married the economist Gerald Shove.

Her work was included in the 1918–19 Georgian poetry volume. She was the first of only two women to be included in that series, the second being Vita Sackville-West. Socially Fredegond was on the fringe of the Bloomsbury group, but mostly resident in Cambridge.

Her poems "Motion and Stillness", "Four Nights", "The New Ghost", and "The Water Mill" were set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams in Four Poems by Fredegond Shove for baritone and piano. Vaughan Williams' wife Adeline Fisher was Fredegond's aunt.

She continued to write poetry throughout her life. After her death, her sister Ermengard had a small book privately issued, Fredegond and Gerald Shove containing the poet's brief memoirs of her early years and married life. The introduction to this volume quoted several of the author's poems, which led to a small selection being issued by Cambridge University Press in 1956.

Her sister Ermengard, in the foreword to the 1956 selection, suggests "one can trace the putting off of Bloomsbury, the putting on of Catholicism, the growing ardour of her love for animals, her deepening fears".