Bonarjee, D. N.

Person

Bonarjee, D. N.

• Bonarjee, Dorothy Noel
• Surtel, Dorothy Noel
• Bonarjee, Dorf
• Rhiain India

1894-1983

Dorothy Noel (Dorf) Bonarjee was born in Bareilly, India, on 29 August 1894 the second of the three children of Debendra Nath and Janet Bonarjee. The family moved to London in 1904, when Dorothy was ten. She and her elder brother Bertie enrolled at UCW Aberystwyth in 1912, graduating in 1916. She played an active part in academic life there but is most noted for winning the chair at the 1914 college eisteddfod for a poem on Owain Lawgoch, being simultaneously the first woman and the first non-European to do so. Some nineteen of her poems were published in the journals The Dragon, 1913-1917, and The Welsh Outlook, 1914-1919. In 1917 she became the first woman to gain an internal law degree from University College, London.
Bonarjee subsequently moved to France and married the artist Paul Surtel in 1921. They had two children, Denis who died in infancy and Claire Aruna (1925-2009). The marriage ended in divorce in 1938. Bonarjee spent her remaining days at Jaubergue, her house and vineyard in Gonfaron, Provence. Bonarjee appears to have continued to occasionally compose poetry in France but none appears to have been published in her lifetime; she also co-translated Aurobindo's Heraclitus into French (see Shri Aurobindo, Heraclite, preface by Mario Meunier, trans. by D. N. Bonarjee and Jean Herbert (Paris, [1944])). Dorothy Bonarjee died in 1983.
A selection of her poetry was published in The Hindu Bard: The Poetry of Dorothy 'Dorf' Bonarjee, ed. and introduced by Mohini Gupta and Andrew Whitehead (Aberystwyth: Honno, 2023).

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