A pleasing copy of Katherine Watson’s first and only poetry collection, with a fond ALS and one-page uncollected poem (’Castelvecchio, Verona’) laid in; the latter perhaps relating to her post-war pilgrimage by bicycle to Rome (recounted in the posthumously published Pedallers to Rome (2012)).
Katherine Watson (1918-2008) was an Oxfordshire-based Catholic poet and bookseller, whose early poetry was “frankly and openly imitative of [Gerald Manley] Hopkins” (Hecht, 1956). She served in the Women's Royal Naval Service in WWII, edited “the longest-running and most difficult literary competition in the world,” Nemo’s Almanac, from 1959 to 1970 (followed by John Fuller and then Alan Hollinghurst), opened Watson's Bookshop in Burford, Oxfordshire, in 1966 (the same year as her ALS), which she ran successfully until 1980. She was a peripheral member of John Bailey and Iris Murdoch’s circle, having been in a relationship with Bayley in the early 1950s. From 1964 Watson lived with her companion, Pamela Redmayne. Despite publishing only a single volume in her lifetime, her papers, now held by the Bodleian, show that she continued to write poetry; indeed, her friend, biographer and literary executor, Carolyn King, edited and published Watson’s Collected Poems in 2012.
Watson’s fond ALS of 1966 gifts a copy of The Source to “My dear Anthony” as well as acknowledging his own unnamed work, which “gives [her] pleasure, satisfaction to live with: it is a real enrichment of my ambience”. She closes her letter by wondering: “Are you finding it too cold to work?”
Anthony Hecht (1956) ‘Reviews: Poetry Chronicle, The Hudson Review, 9:3 (Autumn), pp. 444-457