Rosemary Tonks

Rosemary Tonks (17 October 1928 – 15 April 2014) was an English poet and author. After publishing two poetry collections, six novels, and pieces in numerous media outlets, she disappeared from the public eye after her conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity in the 1970s; little was known about her life past that point, until her death.

Rosemary Desmond Boswell Tonks was born 17 October 1928 in Gillingham, Kent, the only child of Gwendoline (née Verdi) and Desmond Tonks, a mechanical engineer. Desmond, who died of blackwater fever in Africa before Rosemary's birth, was the nephew of the surgeon and painter Henry Tonks, an official war artist on the Western Front during World War I and then professor of fine art at the Slade during the 1920s. Desmond's brother Myles was married to Gwendoline's sister Dorothy (the aunt who was later to provide Rosemary with refuge in Bournemouth, when Rosemary's life crisis had become unbearable alone). Tonks attended boarding school at Wentworth college in Bournemouth.

Rosemary published children's stories while a teenager. In 1949, she married Michael Lightband (a mechanical engineer, and later a financier), and the couple moved to Karachi, where she began to write poetry. Attacks of paratyphoid, contracted in Calcutta, and of polio, contracted in Karachi, forced a return to England. She lived in Paris in 1952–53, before returning to London where she settled with her husband in Hampstead. They later divorced and lived several doors from each other for some years.

Tonks worked for the BBC, writing stories and reviewing poetry for the BBC European Service. She published poems in collections and The Observer, the New Statesman, Transatlantic Review, London Magazine, Encounter, and Poetry Review, she read on the BBC's Third Programme. She also wrote "poetic novels".

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