Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds MBE, FRSL (born 9 August 1945) is a British newspaper cartoonist, and writer and illustrator of both children's books and graphic novels.

Both Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drew feature a "doomed heroine", much in the style of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic romantic novel, to which they often allude, but with an ironic, modernist slant.

In the late 1990s Simmonds returned to the pages of The Guardian with Gemma Bovery, which reworked the story of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary into a satirical tale of English expatriates in France.

In 2010 the story was adapted as a feature film of the same name, directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Moira Buffini, again starring Gemma Arterton.

[8][9][10] It is loosely based on Charles Dickens' novella A Christmas Carol; although the story unfolds in 2016-17, its eponymous protagonist is in some respects a female version of Ebenezer Scrooge, and also undergoes a profound (though more subtle and ambiguous) moral transformation.

Simmonds drew the illustrations for the opening titles of the BBC's 2007 production of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, and for Midsummer Nights, a volume of opera-related short stories by prominent writers published in 2009 to mark the 75th anniversary of the Glyndebourne Opera Festival.

[11] After being nominated already in 2001 for Gemma Bovery, Simmonds won the 2009 Prix de la critique of the French Association of comics critics and journalists for Tamara Drewe.