Ridler was the daughter of HC Bradby, a housemaster at Rugby School, where she was born. Her mother, Violet Bradby, born Milford, wrote popular children's stories and was the sister of Humphrey S. Milford, Publisher to the University of Oxford. One of her great-grandfathers was Charles Richard Sumner, Bishop of Winchester, a brother of John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury. Her uncle, GF Bradby, was the author of The Lanchester Tradition (1919), while her aunt Barbara Bradby was the joint author of The Village Labourer (1911). Her cousins included the composer Robin Milford and the Rev. Dick Milford, vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford.

Anne Bradby was educated at Downe House School and later published a biography of her headmistress, Olive Willis. After six months in Florence and Rome, she took a diploma in journalism at King's College London.

In 1938, she married Vivian Ridler, the future Printer to Oxford University (1958-78), but then the manager of the Bunhill Press, London, and they had two daughters and two sons.

She edited Charles Williams: The Image of the City and other Essays (1958) and Charles Williams: Selected Writings (1961). A Christian and friend and correspondent of C. S. Lewis, she was on the edge of the Inklings group. Also closely associated with TS Eliot, she wrote a short but powerful poem, "I Who am Here Dissembled", full of allusions to images in Eliot's own poems, for the anthology T. S. Eliot: A Symposium in honour of his sixtieth birthday.

For a short time in the 1940s, Ridler was also a successful Verse Dramatist with such plays as Cain (1943) and Shadow Factory: A Nativity Play (1945).