Elizabeth Jennings

Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) was born in Boston, Lincolnshire but moved to Oxford at the age of six where she lived for the rest of her life. She studied at St. Anne’s College, Oxford and worked in advertising, at the City Library and briefly in publishing before becoming a full-time writer. Her consistent devotion to poetry yielded over twenty books during her life; the New Collected Poems was published in 2002 after her death.

Jennings is often associated with ‘The Movement’, a collective that included poets such as Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. This is because some of her early work was published as part of the anthology ‘New Lines’ (1956), which was considered the start of the movement. Jennings did not support this association, as she regarded her poetry to be different to the ironic and satirical poetry of Amis and Larkin.

Jennings was a Roman Catholic, and religion was an important theme in her poetry, along with love and death. Although many of her poems were inspired by her life experiences, she urged that her work should not be read as autobiographical.