Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Jennings
-
Standard Name: Jennings, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Joan Jennings
EJ
was a twentieth-century English poet writing on family, literary, and religious subjects. Peter Levi
calls her maybe the last poet of what may be called the soul.
The Ship. St Anne’s College.
92: 54
Early in her career she was identified as being part of the Movement, along with other young Oxford poets like Kingsley Amis
and Philip Larkin
. She found this label problematic.
Contemporary Authors, Autobiography Series. Gale Research.
9: 284
Literary responses
Edith Sitwell
This was praised by British Book News, which rejoiced to find ES
's astonishing verbal dexterity employed in her later work upon themes of ever-increasing profundity . . . . She is a poet...
Textual Production
Penelope Shuttle
The first book that affected PS
deeply was Brontë
's Jane Eyre, with whose protagonist she identified.
Steffens, Daneet. “Penelope Shuttle”. Mslexia, No. 33, pp. 46-8.
JS
was, with Helen Dunmore
, U. A. Fanthorpe
, and Elizabeth Jennings
, one of the four poets featured in no. 5 of the audio-cassette series The Poetry Quartets, issued today by the...
This collection contained contributions from poets, artists, and musicians to the celebration of the nine hundredth anniversary of Winchester Cathedral. Humphrey Clucas
, Clive Sansom
, Leslie Norris
, Elizabeth Jennings
, Peter Levi
,...
The final book by RP
to appear before her death was Collected Poems, with an introduction by Elizabeth Jennings
.
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Textual Features
Ruth Padel
RP
takes the journey as the most central of all poetic images. The first part of her book is a guide to reading poetry, divided under headings of which many include the words journey,...
Literary responses
Willa Muir
WM
characterised this book as very like a Scotch bun . . . because it has a bit of everything in it, not classified into layers like a respectable English cake.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The poet Elizabeth Jennings
Textual Features
Alice Meynell
AM
's subtle, meditative, poetic style shares characteristics with other religious women writers, looking back to Christina Rossetti
and forward to Elizabeth Jennings
. She disliked praise of her writing as feminine, preferring this...
Reception
Philip Larkin
Anthony Thwaite
edited PL
's Collected Poems in 1988 and his Selected Letters, 1940-1985, in 1992. Andrew Motion
published a biography in 1993.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
The chapters are headed with quotations ranging eclectically through the international canon and counter-canon from Sophocles
and The Ramayana of Valmiki (an ancient Indian epic) to Spike Milligan
, via Charles Baudelaire
, T. S. Eliot
Textual Production
U. A. Fanthorpe
She co-operated with others in many further works. She appeared with Tony Lopez
in Mortal Heart, 1981. In 1994 she participated in two joint projects: Painter and Poet: Three Poems (limited edition), where her...
Timeline
1 January 1916: The British edition of Vogue (an American...
Building item
1 January 1916
The British edition of Vogue (an American fashion magazine) began publishing from Condé Nast
in Hanover Square, London.
1944: The quarterly magazine Outposts (described...
Writing climate item
1944
The quarterly magazineOutposts (described by poet Elizabeth Jennings
as that great encourager of young talent) began publication.
1951: The title of Leslie Allen Paul's memoirs,...
Writing climate item
1951
The title of Leslie Allen Paul
's memoirs, Angry Young Man, provided the term Angry Young Men, applied in newspapers and then by critics to a group of largely working-class, socially rebellious, young...
14 January 1956: D. J. Enright's anthology Poets of the 1950s...
Writing climate item
14 January 1956
D. J. Enright
's anthologyPoets of the 1950s brought together work by eight poets generally taken to be leading voices in the recently-catagorized, modern but anti-modernist Movement.
1998-9: In a league table of sales in verse for these...
Writing climate item
1998-9
In a league table of sales in verse for these years, published by the Guardian in October 2000, Ted Hughes
was the highest with 172,174, Seamus Heaney
second with 34,690, and Carol Ann Duffy
third...
Texts
Jennings, Elizabeth. “A poet’s love”. Times, p. 21.
Jennings, Elizabeth. A Sense of the World. A. Deutsch, 1958.
Jennings, Elizabeth. A Way of Looking. A. Deutsch, 1955.
Jennings, Elizabeth. A Way of Looking. Rinehart, 1955.
Jennings, Elizabeth. After the Ark. Oxford University Press, 1978.
Jennings, Elizabeth, editor. An Anthology of Modern Verse, 1940-1960. Methuen, 1961.
Jennings, Elizabeth. Celebrations and Elegies. Carcanet, 1982.
Pitter, Ruth, and Elizabeth Jennings. Collected Poems. Enitharmon Press, 1990.