Literary Life

Posy Simmonds

Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds MBE, FRSL is a British newspaper cartoonist, and writer and illustrator of both children's books and graphic novels. She is best known for her long association with The Guardian, for which she drew the series Gemma Bovery (2000) and Tamara Drewe (2005–06), both later published as books. Her style gently satirises the English middle classes and in particular those of a literary bent. Both Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drew feature a "doomed heroine", much in the style of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic romantic novel, to which they often allude, but with an ironic, modernist slant.