Catherine Reilly (4 April 1925 – 26 September 2005) was a British bibliographer and anthologist of women's poetry of the

First First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1). First or 1st may also refer to: *World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement Arts and media Music * 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...

and Second World Wars.

Early life

Reilly was born in

Stretford Stretford is a market town in Trafford, Greater Manchester, England. It is situated on flat ground between the River Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal, south of Manchester city centre, south of Salford and north-east of Altrincham. Str ...

, Lancashire on 4 April 1925 and was the eldest of four children. She was taught to read by the age of three by her maternal grandmother. Two years before her father died, the family moved to Fallowfield where Reilly attended

Hollies Convent FCJ School The Hollies Convent FCJ School was a girls' direct-grant Roman Catholic grammar school in south Manchester, England. History In 1820, Marie-Madeleine d'Houët, also known as Marie Madeleine Victoire, founded the society of the Faithful Compani ...

through a scholarship. The school was evacuated to Clitheroe in 1939 where Reilly and her sister Eileen lived in a country house on the

River Ribble The River Ribble runs through North Yorkshire and Lancashire in Northern England. It starts close to the Ribblehead Viaduct in North Yorkshire, and is one of the few that start in the Yorkshire Dales and flow westwards towards the Irish Sea (t ...

Later life and career

After leaving school at the age of 16, she worked in

public libraries A public library is a library that is accessible by the general public and is usually funded from public sources, such as taxes. It is operated by librarians and library paraprofessionals, who are also civil servants. There are five fundamenta ...

in Greater Manchester, first in the city and then, from 1974, in Trafford. She published her first book, ''English Poetry of the First World War:A Bibliography'', in 1978. It took her four years to write and won her a fellowship of the Library Association. While researching her book, Reilly realised that out of the 2,225 British people she had identified that had published poetry about the war, a quarter of them were women despite the fact that the majority of poetry collections published after the war included no women. This led to her publishing her own collection of poems about the war, '' Scars Upon My Heart'', in 1981. Her second collection of poetry, called ''Chaos of the Night'', was published in 1984 and like her first collection, only included works by women. She published ''English Poetry of the Second World War'' in 1986 which won her the Besterman Medal for Bibliography. As well as poetry from the First and Second World Wars, Reilly also published bibliographies of poetry from the Victorian era. The first ''Late Victorian Poetry, 1880-1899'' was published in 1994 and her second, ''Mid-Victorian Poetry, 1860-1879'' was published in 2000. She began writing a third, ''Early Victorian Poetry'', but it was not completed by the time of her death. Reilly was diagnosed with cancer in 2001. She died on 26 September 2005.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reilly, Catherine 1925 births 2005 deaths People from Stretford English librarians British women librarians British librarians English women writers People educated at the Hollies Convent Grammar School Women bibliographers Women anthologists Alumni of Merton College, Oxford