In her new biography of the poet Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), Dana Greene asks: “How did this woman, against extraordinary odds of psychological instability, poverty, ill health and neediness achieve what she did?” It is a good question to which her book Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War (OUP) goes some way to answering.
For Jennings, there was very little separation between her writing and her life. Whatever she suffered at various stages of her life, including a period at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford after a breakdown, was turned into poetry. As she wrote in Writing Poems: Primary Source: “…this demanding, impatient, moody/Aching, recalcitrant/ Kind, perceptive/ Honest, yes/Beautiful/Art. It is my life my/Raison d’etre.”
