Elizabeth Jenkins

Margaret Elizabeth Jenkins (31 October 1905 – 5 September 2010) was an English 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."

Early life Jenkins was born on 31 October 1905 in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Her father, James Heald Jenkins, established the Caldicott School in 1904, which he named for her mother, Theodora Caldicott Ingram.

She attended the Modern School and St Christopher School, Letchworth and the women-only Newnham College, Cambridge from 1921, a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, where she studied English and history,

Writing career

Novelist Through Newnham's principal Pernel Strachey she met Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf, who would later call her first novel Virginia Water (1929) "a sweet white grape of a book". whose relatives starved her to death to get to her inheritance, won the Prix Femina. She beat Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust and Antonia White's Frost in May to the prize. The novels Doubtful Joy followed in 1935 and The Phoenix' Nest in 1936. Other novels include Robert and Helen (1944) and A Silent Joy (1992).

The Tortoise and the Hare (1954) is Jenkins' most successful novel. In his review John Betjeman said, "I do not think there is a sentence in this book out of character." It is about a marriage that was deeply troubled despite surface appearances. It was praised by Hilary Mantel in The Sunday Times as showing that Jenkins "seems to know a good deal about how women think and how their lives are arranged". Dr. Gully's Story, Jenkins' favourite, retold the story of the 19th-century physician James Manby Gully, whose affair with Florence Bravo, and the subsequent poisoning death of her husband Charles Bravo, led to never-proven suspicions that Gully had committed murder. Her 2004 memoir The View from Downshire Hill recounted her decades of living in a Regency architecture home she bought in Hampstead. She moved into the house in 1939 and decorated it with Regency style furniture that she had acquired inexpensively in the years following World War II from period houses that had been damaged during the war. She would later say that, based on her decor, "people assumed I was comfortably off, instead of being very hard up". Holland was the basis of the character Evelyn in Jenkins' The Tortoise and the Hare, which Jenkins said was an autobiography "not in fact, but in feeling."

Jenkins died at the age of 104 on 5 September 2010 at a nursing home in Hampstead, London, where she had resided in the years before her death. She never married.