Maurice Roy Ridley (25 January 1890 – 12 June 1969) was a writer and poet, and Fellow and Chaplain of Balliol College, Oxford.

Ridley was the son of William Dawson Ridley, a Church of England clergyman, Rector of Orcheston St Mary, Wiltshire, and his wife Jane Elizabeth Rutherford. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol, and Balliol College, Oxford.^[1][2]

His grandfather, Thomas Dawson Ridley, a civil engineer of Coatham, Yorkshire, died in 1898, leaving a substantial fortune.^[3] His father died in 1899 in Bordighera.^[4]

From 1920 to 1945, Ridley was a Fellow and Tutor of Balliol. He spent 1930–1931 as a visiting professor at Bowdoin College under the auspices of the Tallman Foundation. He was a lecturer at Bedford College, University of London, from 1948,^[1] where he earned a Doctorate of Humane Letters.

On 23 September 1922, he married Katherine Scott in Cleveland, Ohio.^[5]

Dorothy L. Sayers based the physical description of her character Lord Peter Wimsey (the archetypal British gentleman detective) on that of Ridley after seeing him read his Newdigate Prize-winning poem "Oxford" at the Encaenia ceremony in July 1913.^[6][7]

• Newdigate Prize, 1913

• Keats' Craftsmanship: A Study in Poetic Development. Oxford: Clarendon. 1933.
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Leicester: Edmund Ward. 1944.
• Studies in Three Literatures. English, Latin, Greek. Contrasts and Comparisons. London: Dent. 1962. ISBN 0313201897.
• Shakespeare's Plays: A Commentary.
• Abraham Lincoln.
• On Reading Shakespeare.