Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War
By Dana Greene
OUP, 288pp, £25/$35
Dana Greene has written a sympathetic and perceptive study of the life of Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001). In under 300 pages, she handles the major themes of Jennings’s poetry, relating them to stages of the poet’s life, and deals insightfully with the “inward war” that Jennings contended with all her life: a conflict that included psychological instability, poverty, poor health and loneliness.
Greene asks the question: how did Jennings, against the odds, achieve what she did: 48 books of poetry, prose and anthology and a massive archive of unpublished poems? The answer is that poetry was her life. The flow did not cease in the face of adversity. Indeed, during the time Jennings spent at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford from 1963 to 1965 after suffering a breakdown, she continued to write, turning her experiences of mental suffering into poetry.
