Background
Fredegond was the daughter of the legal historian Frederic William Maitland and his wife Florence Henrietta Fisher.
Fredegond was the daughter of the legal historian Frederic William Maitland and his wife Florence Henrietta Fisher.
In 1918, the publisher, B.H. Blackwell, released a volume of Fredegond"s poems, Dreams and Journeys. Her work was included in the 1918-1919 Georgian poetry volume. She was the first of only two women to be included in that series, the second (in the 1920-1922 volume) being Vita Sackville-West.
Socially Fredegond was on the fringe of the Bloomsbury group, but mostly resident in Cambridge.
Her poems "Motion and Stillness", "Four Nights", "The New Ghost", and "The Water Mill" were set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams in Four Poems by Fredegond Shove for baritone and piano (1922). These four poems were included in Fredegond"s Dreams and Journeys" volume.
Vaughan Williams" wife Adeline Fisher was Fredegond"s aunt. Leonard and Virginia Woolf"s Hogarth Press published Fredegond"s book of poems, Daybreak, in 1922.
She continued to write poetry throughout her life.
The introduction to this volume quoted several of the author"s poems, which led to a small selection being issued by Cambridge University Press in 1956.