Posy Simmonds  Rosemary Elizabeth "Posy" Simmonds MBE (born 9 August 1945) 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 has drawn 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 of the published books 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. Posy Simmonds was born in Berkshire and educated at Queen Anne's School, Caversham. She studied at the Sorbonne before returning to London to attend Central School of Art & Design. She started her newspaper career drawing a daily cartoon, "Bear", for "The Sun" in 1969. She contributed humorous illustrations to "The Times" from 1968 to 1970. She also contributed to "Cosmopolitan", and a satirical cartoon to Tariq Ali's "Black Dwarf" magazine. She moved to "The Guardian" as an illustrator in 1972. In May 1977 she started drawing a weekly comic strip for "The Guardian", initially titled "The Silent Three of St Botolph's" as a tribute to the 1950s strip "The Silent Three" by Evelyn Flinders. It began as a silly parody of girls' adventure stories making satirical comments about contemporary life. The strip soon focused on three 1950s schoolfriends in their later, middle-class and nearly middle-aged lives: Wendy Weber, a former nurse married to polytechnic sociology lecturer George 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, which was latterly untitled and usually known just as "Posy", ran until the late 1980s. It 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 1981, Simmonds was named Cartoonist of the Year in the British Press Awards.