In 1939, when World War II started, Elizabeth Jenkins left her teaching position and worked assisting Jewish refugees and London air-raid victims for the Assistance Board. [1]
On 31 October 1905, Elizabeth Jenkins was born at Caldicott School in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, where her father was headmaster. She studied English and history at Newnham College, Cambridge, and became a novelist and biographer of Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Lady Caroline Lamb, Joseph Lister and Elizabeth I. Elizabeth Bowen said Jenkins was “among the most distinguished living English novelists.”
Jenkins’s fiction often examined how people could be constrained or manipulated by those around them. Harriet, inspired by the real-life 1877 murder of a vulnerable young woman, won her the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize. Her best-known novel, The Tortoise and the Hare, offered a keenly observed portrait of a marriage coming apart. Alongside her novels, she wrote biographies of figures as varied as Lady Caroline Lamb, Jane Austen and Elizabeth I.
Jenkins’s Jane Austen: The Biography was published in 1938. It was an important biography, though not the first account of Austen’s life: Austen’s brother Henry had written a short biographical notice in 1818, and her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published a Memoir in 1870. Jenkins’s distinctive contribution was to write about Austen as a fellow author, beyond the family’s own recollections.
Her connection with Austen went well beyond her book. In 1940, Jenkins joined Dorothy Darnell and other Austen enthusiasts in forming the Jane Austen Society, whose purpose was to save Austen’s former home at Chawton. A benefactor, T Edward Carpenter, eventually acquired the house, and it is now Jane Austen’s House Museum.
In all, Jenkins wrote a dozen novels and a dozen biographies and continued writing for much of her long life. She was awarded an OBE in 1981 and died in 2010, aged 104.
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Margaret, Brisbane JASA
I bought a paperback copy of her biography of Jane Austen at a secondhand bookshop a few years ago. It was published by Indigo, an imprint of the Cassell Group, in 1996, with a copyrighted postscript by Elizabeth Jenkins dated 1986.
Susannah Fullerton
We had a fascinating talk about Elizabeth Jenkins and the biography. I must re-read it as it is many years since I last read it.
Joan Robertson
Elizabeth Jenkins book was the first I ever read about Jane Austin way back in the late 1940s.
Susannah Fullerton
You’d have enjoyed the talk we had at JASA, Joan. Do you still have your copy?