With thanks to Dr Connie Ruzich* for reminding me that I had not yet posted my research about Fredegond Shove here
Fredegond Cecily Maitland was born in Cambridge, UK in 1889, the birth being registered in March of that year. Her parents were Legal Historian, Frederic William Maitland and his wife, Florence Henrietta, nee Fisher. Friedegon’s father taught English Law at Downing College, St Benedict, Cambridge University. Her mother was a maternal first cousin of Virginia Woolf and sister of Adeline Maria Fisher, the wife of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Her mother's second marriage to Francis Darwin in 1913 brought her in contact with his extended family.
Friedegond attended Newnham College, Cambridge University from 1910–1913 and during that period also spent time in London with the Vaughan Williams family.
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| Gerald and Fredegond |
In 1915 Fredegond married British economist Gerald Frank Shove, who like her own family, had links with the Bloomsbury Group. As a conscientious objector doing farming as his alternative service during the First World War, Gerald worked at Garsington Manor near Oxford for most of 1916–1917.
The future Juliette Huxley, who was working there as a French tutor, later reminisced: "In those days... I saw a good deal of Fredegond Shove, Gerald's wife, who lived like a Spartan at the Bailiff's Cottage."
Their employer, Lady Ottoline Morrell, also remembered Fredegond then as "an enchanting creature, very sensitive, delicate and highly strung, with a fantastic imagination".
After her death in 1949, Fredegond was buried with her husband and other family members in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge. 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). In the introduction to this, she described sorting through the house and finding poems "everywhere: fairly copied in note-books, scribbled on bits of paper, stuffed into bookcases, cupboards and desks – one would not have been surprised to have found them in the oven – literally hundreds of poems."
According to Catherine W. Reilly in her Bibliography ”English Poetry of the First World War” (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1978) - p. 293, Friedegond Shove’s WW1 poems were published under the title “Dreams and Journeys” (Blackwell, Oxford, 1918) and she also had poems published in two WW1 anthologies. (pp. 19 and 23):
Fredegond's poem from “The paths of glory: a collection of poems written during the War, 1914-1918” Ed. Bertram Lloyd (Allen & Unwin, 1919), pp. 98 - 99.
and in "Men who march away" Ed. L.M. Parsons (Chatto & Windus, 1965).
Sources: Wikipedia, Find my Past, FreeBMD
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp72056/gerald-frank-shove
https://archive.org/details/pathsofglorycoll00lloy/page/n9/mode/2up
* You can also Fredegond’s poem “The Farmer” here on Dr. Connie Ruzich’s wonderful website Behind their Lines https://behindtheirlines.blogspot.com/2017/04/conscientious-objectors.html
