| Admin History | Mary Eirene Frances Bellerby (née Parker) (1899-1975), poet and novelist, was born in Bristol on 29 August 1899. Her father, F. Talbot Parker, was an Anglo-Catholic clergyman and her mother, Marion Eirene Parker (née Thomas), was a trained nurse. In August 1915, her brother Jack was killed in action and his loss affected her all her life. On leaving school, she had a series of voluntary and paid jobs: veterinary assistant (she was always passionate about animals), teacher, journalist, research assistant, and parish duties. She also joined the Neighbours, a fellowship for social services founded by the economist John Rotherford Bellerby (18961977) and described by her in a tract and a novel, 'The Neighbours' (1931) and 'Shadowy Bricks' (1932). She began keeping a commonplace book of readings and observations in 1925. Her first published works were a volume of essays, 'Perrhaps?' (1927), and a novella, 'The Unspoiled' (1928). By this time she was living in London where she worked as drama critic for the 'Bristol Times and Mirror'. She married John Bellerby on 9 December 1929. In 1930, Frances Bellerby had a fall while walking along the Lulworth Cliffs on the Dorset coast. The fall resulted in a spinal injury, which recurrently affected her for the rest of her life. Her mother died by suicide in 1932 and Bellerby became estranged from her father. Her marriage faltered from the mid-1930s, ending in divorce in circa 1948, and she moved to a cottage in Cornwall in 1940.
Primarily remembered for her poetry (she wrote poems from the age of three), Bellerby published five collections in her lifetime: 'Plash Mill' (1946) (named after her home in Cornwall), 'The Brightening Cloud and other Poems' (1949), 'The Stone Angel and the Stone Man' (1958), 'The Stuttering Water and other Poems' (1970), and 'The First-Known and other Poems' (1975). Bellerby's poetry has an intense, visionary quality and deals with nature, memory, and loss. This is also true of her prose. Her best-known novel, 'Hath the Rain a Father?' (1946), addresses the social and psychological consequences of bereavement after the First World War, and this is the focus of a number of stories in her three collections: 'Come to an End and other Stories' (1939), 'The Acorn and the Cup with other Stories' (1948), and 'A Breathless Child and other Stories' (1952).
In 1950, Frances Bellerby was diagnosed as having breast cancer and treated with operations and x-ray therapy. While her work was published in many magazines and anthologies, and she received a pension from the civil list for her services to literature in 1973, Bellerby, who was an intensely private person, became increasingly reclusive. In 1951, she moved to Devon and finally settled in Goveton, near Kingsbridge. After her father's death in 1954, she began her autobiography but abandoned it due to the pain it caused her. In 1957, she contracted arterial claudication, a circulatory condition which made it difficult for her to walk. The cancer recurred in 1973 and she died of breast cancer and ankylosing spondylitis on 30 July 1975. A Quaker since 1934, Bellerby instructed in her will that her body be donated to research and that her ashes be scattered near her place of death without flowers or any kind of ceremony. In her obituary, the poet Charles Causley wrote: 'The death
of Frances Bellerby
has robbed contemporary poetry of a unique and distinguished voice. To read her, is to be in the presence of a true original' ('The Times', 07 Aug 1975).
Source: Nathalie Blondel (2013), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography |