Wife U.A. Fanthorpe

Queer Places:
Cheltenham Ladies' College, Bayshill Rd, Cheltenham GL50 3EP
Culverhay House, Culverhay, Wotton-under-Edge GL12 7LS, UK

Rosemarie Vera "R.V." Bailey (born August 20, 1932) is a British Poet. At Cheltenham she met Ursula Askham Fanthorpe, a fellow teacher who became her lifelong partner. Fanthorpe described Bailey as her 'Atlas' 'who keeps my suspect edifice upright in air, As Atlas did the sky'. Theirs was 'a rare union … a devoted couple whose kindliness and old-fashioned courtesy radiated out into the world'. It was celebrated more than forty years later in a civil partnership (on 9 March 2006) and in their collection of love poems, From Me to You (2007).

In 1975 Fanthorpe and Bailey settled at Culverhay House in the small Cotswold town of Wotton under Edge, whose landscape and people provided inspiration for many poems. Safe as Houses (1995) and Consequences (2000) consolidated Fanthorpe's reputation for poetry that was 'risk-taking, deeply-felt, lyrically intense, accessible yet complex'. The title sequence of Consequences, begun when Fanthorpe and Bailey's narrowboat moored beside Bosworth Field, linked the Wars of the Roses to civil wars of her own time in 'Rwanda, Lebanon, Bosnia, Ireland, here'. Consequences was seen as 'nothing short of a State of the Nation address'.

• R.V. Bailey (scriptmania.com)

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