LONDON — U.A. Fanthorpe, a highly regarded English poet who was first inspired by the human tragedy she saw in a neurological hospital, has died at age 79.
She died Tuesday in a hospice near her home in Wotton-under-Edge in western England, said her publisher, Peterloo Poets. No cause of death was given.
Her late-starting career was crowned with honors, including the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 2003. In 1994 she was the first woman to be nominated to be professor of poetry at Oxford (losing to James Fenton), and she was a leading candidate for Poet Laureate in 1999.
Ursula Askham Fanthorpe was born July 22, 1929, in London.
A graduate of Oxford University, she taught at Cheltenham Ladies’ College for 16 years and became head of the English department.
“I began to see that power had an effect on me that I didn’t like,” she said, so she resigned and enrolled with a temporary agency, which led to a receptionist’s job at a neurological hospital in Bristol in 1974. Her experiences there prompted her to begin writing seriously.
“I found it moving, horrifying and beautiful, all the things that human life is, the things that are swept under the curtain that you’re not expected to see,” she said in an interview with The Independent newspaper in 2003.
In an early poem, “The List,” included in her first published collection in 1978, she compared a list of the next day’s patients to figures on a classical frieze.
“Tomorrow these names will turn nasty, / Senile, pregnant, late, / Handicapped, handcuffed, unhandy, / Muddled, moribund, mute, / Be stained by living …”
In an interview for Contemporary Authors, a reference service, Fanthorpe said she had waited so long to start writing because she felt “less interesting than other people who had fought, suffered, endured, etc.”
“It look me a long time to discover that I didn’t have to write about myself. … I needed the shock of experience as a hospital receptionist, which made clear to me that the perspectives of poetry are different from those of medical professionals.”
“She had no side to her, and she was very straight,” said Rosie Bailey, Fanthorpe’s partner for 44 years. “She loved to laugh and loved writing to say what interested her and what mattered to her most.”
Richard Hendin of Peterloo Poets said Fanthorpe’s work was characterized by a “wonderful Englishness.”
“She was a meek, gentle person on the outside who could be selling you jam and really she was undermining you,” Hendin said.
“I’m so old that I remember the last war when I was a child growing up and therefore I remember England as under siege, a feeling of bombs being about to drop and things of that sort,” Fanthorpe said in an interview for The Poetry Archive. “And that meant, for some reason, the impact on me was the specialness of England and the English language.”
Inspiration, she said, often came as “people suddenly tell me things — not because of any gift of mine but because they want to talk — and this will give me, frequently, the best sort of material for writing a poem.”
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