Obituary: Elizabeth Jenkins OBE

Published on Tuesday 7 September 2010 19:23

Elizabeth Jenkins OBE, novelist and biographer. Born: 31 October, 1905, in Hertfordshire. Died: 5 September, 2010, in London, aged 104.

SHE was diminutive in stature but wrote some socially gripping novels that marked her out as an author of real quality. Elizabeth Jenkins wrote both fiction and biographies but it was the former that brought her initial fame.

The Tortoise and the Hare, first published in 1954, brought Jenkins much praise for her ability to tell an upsetting story of infidelity and sexual waywardness. As she often did in her books, she highlighted a growing unease in society. The subject matter was controversial for the 1950s but the book soon became a classic and was republished in 2008 with an introduction by Hilary Mantel and an afterword by Carmen Callil.

In a career that spanned 70 years Jenkins was involved with the Bloomsbury Group - she had challenging relationship with Virginia Woolf - and then wrote a celebrated biography of Queen Elizabeth 1. Jenkins brought to her novels a clear insight into the lives of frail and distraught victims. Some books were based on her own experiences but all displayed a vivid imagination that added a firm dose of social reality to the storytelling.

Margaret Elizabeth Jenkins was the daughter of a headmaster of a preparatory school and was educated in Hertfordshire then, in 1924, at Newnham College, Cambridge where she read English and History. Women were then permitted to take the exams at Cambridge but not to gain a degree.

The principal of Newnham was Pernel Strachey (the sister of author Giles Lytton Strachey), and through her Jenkins met the Bloomsbury set.

Jenkins' first novel, Virginia Water, centred around many of the Bloomsbury characters, was well received. Woolf called it a "sweet white grape" but Jenkins regretted basing so many characters on easily recognisable friends. She tried to destroy as many copies as possible.

Her relationship with Woolf soon soured; Jenkins found Woolf's overbearing manner unforgivable. Later she wrote how she objected to being addressed by Woolf in such "contemptuous and mocking tones".

Jenkins continued to write but for a decade from 1929 taught English at a school in Hampstead. In 1939 she bought Downshire Hill, a Regency house, where she lived for more than half a century.

Her memoirs, published in 2004, were called The View From Downshire Hill.

During the war she worked in various posts, ending in the Ministry of Information, but her writing continued undiminished. She wrote two very successful biographies: the first, Lady Caroline Lamb, was followed by Jane Austen, which brought her into contact with Chawton Cottage in Hampshire where Austen had lived in the 1800s.

The cottage was in a rundown state and Jenkins - in 1940 when funds were not easy to come by - started a restoration campaign.

The formation of the Jane Austen Society, of which she was a founder member, followed and Jenkins served as its secretary and on the committee for more than 50 years. Her book on Austen was, for many years, considered the most detailed account of the writer's life.

Jenkins reached her zenith as a writer in the 1950s. The Tortoise and the Hare, published in 1954, was an absorbing tale of betrayal by a middle-aged barrister. The title refers to the two women competing for his love and how the beautiful wife slowly looses her confidence and her insecurities overwhelm her.

It remains an incisive examination of a mid-life crisis and reflected the disappointment that Jenkins had herself experienced in a love affair. It was an immediate best seller and is now a classic. Jenkins also made her mark with some excellent biographies in the decade writing with a convincing authority on the Elizabethan era. In 1958 she published Elizabeth the Great, which the distinguished historian AL Rowse said "got nearer to penetrating the secret of the most remarkable woman in history than any other".

That was followed in 1961 by Elizabeth and Leicester, in which Jenkins claimed the queen was incapable of having an active sex life, having witnessed the executions of Ann Boleyn and Katherine Howard. Jenkins argued that that made the future queen associate sex with violent death.

Her 1972 novel, Dr Gully, once again told of a doomed triangular love affair, involving a barrister, his wife and a doctor. It was based on a real Victorian murder that had scandalised London in the 1870s.

Jenkins never married but in an interview when she was 100 admitted that "doctors of the first rank are always attractive". A lengthy affair with a surgeon, who was married, ended unhappily. "Yes," she admitted, "he made me unhappy, but it was worth it. My feeling for him lasted after his death. It is still going on now."

Alasdair Steven