Lucy Vickery

Replies from Shakespeare’s dark lady and Frances Cornford’s fat woman

G.K. Chesterton, who wrote a response to the triolet ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from a Train’ [Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images] 
issue 01 May 2021

In Competition No. 3196, you were invited to supply a reply to the poet from Frances Cornford’s fat woman or Shakespeare’s dark lady. Philip Roe and George Simmers both reminded me that G.K. Chesterton set the bar high with ‘The Fat White Woman Speaks’, his response to Cornford’s triolet (which was also parodied by A.E.

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