E. J. Scovell

Edith Joy Scovell (9 April 1907 – 19 October 1999) was an English poet and translator. Among those who admired her work were the fellow-writers Vita Sackville-West and Philip Larkin.

Life Edith Joy Scovell was born in Eccleshall Bierlow, near Sheffield. Her father, F. G. Scovell, was Anglican rector of the village. Joy was one of eight children. She studied at Casterton School, Westmorland, and at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating in English literature.

Despite her background, Scovell ceased to be a religious believer: "I lost religion fairly early on," she told interviewer Jem Poster. "I mean religious faith – if indeed I ever had it." Scovell married in 1937 the ecologist Charles Sutherland Elton, who had established the Bureau of Animal Population in Oxford. They had a daughter, Catherine Ingrid Buffonge MBE, in 1940 and a son, Robert Elton, in 1943. In general, Scovell remained reticent about private matters: "I have had a fairly ordinary life I think, with normal experiences." She died in Oxford in October 1999.

Scovell's many poems about children include "An Early Death", inspired by a grandchild who died at the age of three: "To have stood in the doorway in your shift of grace/With hands half lifted, so to have looked in/On mortal life, it is not nothing – is/A hammer stroke that rings and rings."

Scovell translated some work by the late 19th-century Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli.

Works Shadows of Chysanthemums (1944) The Midsummer Meadow (1946) The River Steamer (1956) The Space Between (including the Pascoli translations, 1982) Listening to Collared Doves (1986)