Simmonds, Posy b.1945

Simmonds, Posy b.1945

Posy Simmonds original cartoon artwork

Posy Simmonds studied at the Sorbonne before returning to London to attend Central School of Art & Design. In 1969, she started her newspaper career drawing a daily cartoon, "Bear", for the Sun whilst contributing humorous illustrations to The Times. She also drew for Cosmopolitan, and a satirical cartoon to Black Dwarf magazine. She moved to The Guardian as an illustrator in 1972.

In 1977, she started drawing a weekly comic strip for The Guardian, initially titled The Silent Three of St Botolph's. It began as a silly parody of girls' adventure stories making satirical comments about contemporary life. The strip soon focused on 3  school friends in their later, middle-class and nearly middle-aged lives: Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to sociology lecturer with a large brood of children; Jo Heep, married to whisky salesman Edmund with two rebellious teenagers; and Trish Wright, married to philandering advertising executive Stanhope and with a young baby. The strip, known just as "Posy", was collected into a number of books: Mrs Weber's Diary, Pick of Posy, Very Posy and Pure Posy, and one original book featuring the same characters, True Love. Her later cartoons for The Guardian and The Spectator were collected as Mustn't Grumble in 1993.

In the 1980s, she contributed a regular full-page strip to Harper's Magazine in America. In the late 1990s Posy returned to the pages of The Guardian with Gemma Bovery which reworked the story of Gustave Flaubert's novel into a satirical tale of English expatriates in France. It was published as a graphic novel in 1999 and was made into a feature film in 2014.