Reilly, Catherine

Catherine Winifred Reilly was born 4th April 1925 in Stretford, Lancashire, and was the eldest of four children. Her maternal grandmother moved from Cork some years before to begin the family home in Manchester. Reilly’s grandmother was very involved in her education, teaching her to read by the time she was three years old, which may be where her passion for poetry and bibliographies began. Two years before Reilly’s father died, the family moved to Fallowfield, Manchester, where Reilly won a scholarship to attend Hollies Convent FCJ School.

In 1939, World War II began. During its first eight months – a period known as the Phoney War – very little military action occurred. However, children were still evacuated to the countryside, and this included 14-year-old Catherine and her sister, Eileen. They were sent to a retired army major’s home in Lancashire, next to the River Ribble, where Reilly experienced the ups and downs of middle-class country life. Growing up as a girl during a world war no doubt influenced Reilly’s interest in the ignored and forgotten poetry of this war and World War I before it.

After leaving school before she turned 16, Reilly became a temporary clerk for the Civil Service. From there, she became a student librarian for Manchester Public Libraries, where she spent the rest of her career. She progressed between roles and eventually became Assistant Borough Librarian. Her time in the industry is likely to have given her access to many of the resources she would need for her research, though it couldn’t provide her with everything she needed. In order to gain access to funding for travel and library visits, she needed a degree. In 1980, at the age of 55, Reilly was awarded a major state studentship to study for an MLitt at Merton College in Oxford. Outside of work and school, she was a party lover with many admirers, and on being the oldest person in her class of 11 women at Merton, she cheerfully stated she would ‘be known for the dryness of my sherry and my wit’.

Reilly’s bibliographies focus on uncovering and exploring women’s poetry from World War I, World War II and the Victorian era (approx. 1820–1914). Her most successful collection is Scars Upon My Heart, a collection of poetry and verse written by women during World War I. Reilly was inspired to create it after research for her first collection, English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography, revealed that although around a quarter of published wartime poets she found were women, they very rarely featured in anthologies about the era. Women were considered to not have much to say about the war, but their involvement and impact was undeniable and Reilly, a girl who grew up during World War II, wanted to build a ‘representative collection’ of those experiences. It was important to Reilly to include poetry and verse from all walks of life and levels of craft, from amateur to professional. These women all had things to say, after all. Read more about women’s poetry from World War I and Reilly’s work here.

Reilly continued this work throughout all of her following collections, with an important feature of her work being the extensive biographical notes included, which offer valuable insight into the poets and context of their poetry. At the time of her death, she was working on a third collection of poetry by Victorian women. Both The Guardian and The Independent wrote obituaries for her.