Elizabeth Jenkins

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EJ , whose productive period extended from just after World War Two into the twenty-first century, was the author of half a dozen historical biographies and twice that many novels (several of which portray women in the position of victims of one kind or another), besides a play, book reviews, and a memoir. Some of her works have been often reprinted.
  • BirthName: Margaret Elizabeth Heald Jenkins
    As an author she used only the second of her given names.

Milestones

31 October 1905

EJ was born at Brockton House, Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, a Victorian gothic building in soft red brick.
Grimes, William. “Books: Elizabeth Jenkins, Woman of Letters, Dies at 104”. The New York Times, 8 Sept. 2010.
“Elizabeth Jenkins”. The Telegraph, 6 Sept. 2010.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson, 2004.
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12 September 1938

EJ published a critical biography of another author of the past, Jane Austen , for some of whose works she also wrote introductions.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
1910 (10 September 1938): 580
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

By mid-April 1954

EJ published a novel, The Tortoise and the Hare, about a sweet-natured, nervous, submissive middle-class wife whose marriage collapses in face of rivalry from a determined though not conventionally attractive woman.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
2724 (16 April 1954): 245
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

By late 2004

EJ titled her memoirs from her Hampstead address: The View from Downshire Hill. They were published at Norwich, lightly edited by her nephew Sir Michael Jenkins .
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
5295 (24 September 2004): 15; 5305 (3 December 2004): 11; 5313 (28 January 2005): 32

5 September 2010

EJ died in a Hampstead nursing home at the age of one hundred and four.
Grimes, William. “Books: Elizabeth Jenkins, Woman of Letters, Dies at 104”. The New York Times, 8 Sept. 2010.

Biography

Birth and Family

31 October 1905

EJ was born at Brockton House, Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, a Victorian gothic building in soft red brick.
Grimes, William. “Books: Elizabeth Jenkins, Woman of Letters, Dies at 104”. The New York Times, 8 Sept. 2010.
“Elizabeth Jenkins”. The Telegraph, 6 Sept. 2010.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson, 2004.
13

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