Rosemary Tonks

After publishing two poetry collections, six novels,[2] and pieces in numerous media outlets, she disappeared from the public eye following her conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity in the 1970s; little was known about her life past that point, until her death.

[1] In 1949, aged 20, she married Michael Lightband (who became a senior partner in a consulting structural engineering practice and later, a financier), and the couple moved to Karachi for his work, where she began to write poetry.

Tonks published two collections, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (Putnam, 1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (Bodley Head, 1967), and after both books went out of print following each publisher's decision to axe their poetry lists, she was discussing a selected edition of her work with John Moat and John Fairfax's Phoenix Press in Newbury from 1976 until 1980, when the project was abandoned following her conversion to a puritanical form of Christianity.

"[3] In the 30-minute BBC Radio 4 Lost Voices documentary, "The Poet Who Vanished", broadcast 29 March 2009, Brian Patten observed, from the literary world's perspective, she'd "evaporated into air like the Cheshire cat"; Tonks had disappeared from public view and was living a hermetic existence, refusing telephone and personal calls from friends, family and the media.

[2] Following her death in April 2014, Neil Astley published an obituary[2] and then an article[1] in the Guardian, followed by his introduction to the 2014 Bloodaxe Books edition of her collected poetry and selected prose, Bedouin of the London Evening,[6] in which he revealed the background to her "disappearance", how she had "turned her back on the literary world after a series of personal tragedies and medical crises which made her question the value of literature and embark on a restless, self-torturing spiritual quest".

Tonks characterised her dual detached retinas as her "reward" for "10 long years searching for God", believing they had been acquired through her practice of extreme Taoist eye exercises.

In 1981 she made the decision to "confront her profession"[6] and burnt the manuscript of an unpublished novel, apparently in the belief that the work was spiritually dangerous.

There are illicit love affairs in seedy hotels and scenes of café life across Europe and the Middle East; there are sage reflections on men who are shy with women.

Poet and essayist Dennis O'Driscoll quotes Tonks in support of his own position on the visual importance of poetry in print: "There is an excitement for the eye in a poem on the page which is completely different from the ear's reaction".

My subject is city life – with its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed buses, banknotes, soapy bathrooms, newspaper-filled parks; and its anguish, its enraged excitement, its great lonely joys.

Some critics felt this was a fault and labelled the autobiographical dimension of her writing "feminine" in a pejorative sense; others decided her directness was invigorating and showed the uniqueness of her voice, making for a lively, distinct fictional world.

Her fiction, in particular, moved from a dissatisfaction with urban living found in both her collections of poetry and in satiric novels such as The Bloater and Businessmen as Lovers to a pronounced loathing of middle to upper-middle class materialism in her later work.

"[12] In The New Yorker, writer and critic Audrey Wollen describes a substantial comic achievement—this is from a 2023 Tonks reassessment: "All of The Bloater, however—every single sentence—is funny.