Fredegond Shove
Her mother was a maternal first cousin to Virginia Woolf and sister of Adeline Maria Fisher, the wife of Ralph Vaughan Williams.
"[3] Their employer, Lady Ottoline Morrell, also remembered Fredegond then as "an enchanting creature, very sensitive, delicate and highly strung, with a fantastic imagination".
One of them, "The Farmer 1917", conjures an evocative rural scene amidst the anguish of war, which suited it for The Paths of Glory (1919), a post-war anthology covering the broader field of poetry written in the period.
The following year it appeared in the American anthology The Book of Modern British Verse (Boston, 1919)[8] and translated by Rafael Cansinos-Asséns in the Hispano-American review Cervantes.
[9] The poem in Shove's collection referred to most often was "The New Ghost", a mystical tale of a departing soul met by the Divine in a springtime setting.
[18] Later critics have been unkind about Vaughan Williams's use of her work, speculating that he only set her poems because of their family relationship[19] and describing her as "a wholly unexceptional poet".
[26] Her spiritualised vision is typically manifest in "Revelation": Near as my hand The transformation: (time to understand Is long but never far, As things desirèd are:) No iceberg floating at the pole; no mark Of glittering, perfect consciousness, nor dark And mystic root of riddles; death nor birth, Except of heart, when flesh is changed from earth To heaven involved in it: not at all strange, Not set beyond the common, human range; Possible in the steep, quotidian stream, Possible in a dream; Achieved when all the energies are still – Especially the will.
[27] The tentative pointing here to a reality underlying outward appearance has been cited by a later religious commentator as the kind of mystical epiphany found "even in the most ordinary moments of life".
Her sister Ermengarde Maitland (1887–1968) acted as her literary executor and had the poet's brief memoirs of her early years and married life privately published as Fredegond and Gerald Shove (1952).
