Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

Collection is open to research.

Use Restrictions

See the University of Virginia Library’s use policy.

Preferred Citation

Gay Clifford Poetry, Accession 11268, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library

Acquisition Information

These poems were given to the University of Virginia Library on January 24, 1997, by Pamela Clifford, Minchinhampton, England.

Funding Note

Funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

Scope and Content

This collection consists of four typescript sets of poetry by Gay Allis Rose Clifford (1943-), all written between 1978 and 1984, when the effects of a cerebral hemorrhage prevented her from further work. Eighty-nine of these poems have been published in Poems by Gay Clifford Introduced by Germaine Greer (Special Collections PR 6053 .L492P6 1990). Each poem includes the date of composition and revision with an occasional autograph change or correction.

Having obtained a First Class degree and a Bachelor's of Philosophy at Oxford in 1964, Clifford pursued a career in English literature at the University of Warwick, the University of Virginia , Emory in Atlanta, and at the University College of London (summer 1978). She also wrote Notes on the Merchant of Venice and The Transformations of Allegory (1974).