How welcome it is to find a book published by a small private concern in this age of conglomerates; the more pleasing when one knows that the Perpetua Press is the creation of the poet Anne Ridler’s husband Vivian, former Printer of the Oxford University Press, and that it is still run from their Oxford home, where they raised three children and lived from 1948 until Anne Ridler’s death, aged 89, in 2001.
These gentle reminiscences, the final few pages put together by the Ridlers’ son Ben, are of happy industry based on the Affirmative Way, ‘which pursues perfection through delight in/adoration of the created world’. This was the philosophy of the two writers who most inspired Ridler’s devoted Anglicanism, her friend Charles Williams and the 17th-century poet Thomas Traherne.
Ridler, a keen chorister, found the certainties of faith in liturgy and music as much as theology; but it is an underlying pleasure in small things — ‘a sorbet of snow’ on a tramp up Monte Subiaso; wild grape hyacinths — which makes her account hum with special contentment.
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