Other lives: English literature teacher who devoted her later life to writing and reading poetry
My aunt Patricia Hann, who has died aged 99, had a long career teaching English literature in a variety of private schools; she was also an accomplished poet.
She was born into a lower middle-class family in Ilford, Essex, where money was in short supply but ambition was plenty. Her mother, Raie (nee Phillips) was a secretary, and her father, Hugh Hann, was a travelling salesman. Educated at Barking Abbey grammar school, she was evacuated to Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, at the outbreak of the second world war before winning an exhibition to Queen Mary College (now part of London University) to study English literature.
After graduation she spent her career teaching English at private schools in southern England.
On retiring in 1987 from Christ’s Hospital school, Hertford, where she had taught for more than a dozen years, Patricia settled in Greenwich, south-east London, to be near her friend Audrey Judge, an artist and teacher.
Always interested in fairness and justice, Patricia worked for several years as a volunteer for Citizens Advice. She also wrote, and in 2008 won third prize in the Poetry London competition. A fine linguist, in 2012 she won second prize in a Stephen Spender Trust competition for her translation of Eugenio Montale’s poem The Sunflower from Italian into English.
Following Audrey’s death in 2020, Patricia published a book of her own poems entitled Voyaging Through Time, dedicated to their “friendship of a lifetime”. She was often invited by her local poetry society to give readings of her work, which were always popular, and in the last years of her life she became relatively well known around Greenwich.
Almost until her death Patricia was doing her own shopping and running her own house unaided.
Her sister, Muriel, my mother, died in 2013. Patricia is survived by me and my brother, Lawrence.