Ruth Bedford

Born in Petersham, Sydney, to Alfred Percival Bedford and Agnes Victoria Stephen, daughter of Sir Alfred Stephen, an influential chief justice, whose family she wrote about in her humorous book A Family Chronicle (1954).[1]

Ruth Bedford and her sisters Sylvia and Alfreda were educated at home by governesses. Bedford proved a talented verse writer from an early age: her first book, Rhymes by Ruth was published when she was eleven years old in 1893 (revised and reprinted 1896).[2]

Bedford wrote a number of poems for various Australian newspapers, especially The Sydney Morning Herald, where her poetry appeared over a 30-year period. The Brisbane Courier described her as a poet who "writes attractive verse, reflective and sensitive to a degree."[3]

In 1931, Ruth Bedford established the Sydney PEN Centre in collaboration with her friend, the poet Dorothea Mackellar.[4] As honorary secretary she traveled to Buenos Aires as the club's representative in 1936.[5] Bedford was also honorary secretary of the Zonta Club in Sydney in 1933[6] and a member of the Women's Pioneer Society.[7]

In 1953 Bedford received a grant from the Commonwealth Literary Fund to publish her chronicle of the Bedford and Stephen families, which was largely based on the diaries kept by her grandmother from 1846 to 1886.[8]

Ruth Bedford never married and died in Paddington, New South Wales in 1963.