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Memoirs of 100 years as a literary lion
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Novelist Elizabeth Jenkins has written a memoir at the age
of 100. Here Ruth Gorb chats to her about her loves and life in
Hampstead
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Elizabeth Jenkins’ beloved home in Downshire Hill,
Hampstead
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Elizabeth Jenkins is a distinguished biographer and novelist,
awarded the OBE for services to literature, but her distinction
goes beyond her many works of fiction and non-fiction.
With her erudition and elegance of style and impeccable taste, she
can be termed a woman of letters. She is the last surviving founder
member of the Jane Austen Society, and probably the last surviving
link with the Bloomsbury Group.
And now, after a silence of too many years, she has published another
book, a memoir – in her 100th year.
On the cover of the book, The View From Downshire Hill, there is
a photograph of the pink Regency house where she lived for 50 years.
She lives now in a retirement home, her hearing and her memory not
quite what they were, but with her humour, her penetrating blue
eyes and delightfully ascerbic tongue intact.
“Do I still read? Good gracious, what else would I do?’’
she says.
The Daily Telegraph is delivered as we speak, but her real joy is
re-reading the books she has always loved, Jane Austen most of all
– someone, I suggest, she resembles.
Another “good gracious”, but it is all there: the essential
Englishness, the cool fastidiousness, the sharp eye that misses
none of the folly, or the beauty, of the world.
The books she wrote in the 1930s. 1940s and 1950s were widely praised.
Her biography, Elizabeth the Great, was hailed as a classic, as
was the biography of Lady Caroline Lamb, although she says she could
never now write with sympathy about such a character.
She writes in her memoir, with feeling that evidently comes from
the heart: “We have, so many of us, seen too much of selfish
neurotics who damage other people’s lives.”
She is pragmatic about the fact that her books often feature crime
and evil: Harriet (which won the prestigious Femina Vie-Heureuse
prize), for instance, is a chilling story about a simple girl being
slowly starved to death by relatives anxious to get their hands
on her money.
“Why so much crime? If you make a success in one line, publishers
never let it go,” she says.
She is, and always has been, a practical woman.
When she was asked, on the re-issue of her novel The Tortoise and
the Hare, what she felt about being classed as a ‘Virago Modern
Classic’ she replied sharply that she was pleased to have the
money.
In her new memoir, however, she reveals that there was pain behind
the quick riposte: of the book she writes: “I have never looked
at it since; it marked an era to which I had no desire to return.”
The significance of what she said came later in our conversation.
She talked first of her happy childhood in Hertfordshire, of her
father’s encouragement – “he turned the old nursery
into a writing room for me” – but also of her parents’
strict Methodism.
She was taught to be dutiful and had instilled in her a sense of
guilt that remains to this day.
“I have been unkind, un-Christian, behaved badly to people...
You find it hard to believe? You haven’t seen me on my worse
days,” she says.
She took two degrees at Cambridge, in English and History, and it
was thanks to the Principal of Newnham, Pernel Strachey (sister
of Lytton Strachey) that she was introduced to Leonard and Virginia
Woolf.
On several occasions she would walk from her furnished room in Doughty
Street to their flat in Tavistock Square to sit at the feet of the
great Mrs Woolf, breathless then at the privilege, but uncompromising
today in her condemnation.
She recalls: “She was cruel, appalling. Beautiful, yes –
but odd. Leonard was an angel, but it was partly his fault that
she was so odious. He spoilt her. I remember one occasion when a
young artist dared to correct Virginia about the name of a plant.
Leonard took him to one side and said, ‘Don’t contradict
Virginia – she can’t take it.’”
The visits ended in tears. At the last tea-party Virginia mocked
the young Elizabeth, mercilessly and with contempt.
She never went back, but cherishes the memory of Leonard Woolf,
infinitely kind, taking her arm and escorting her downstairs, the
gentle antidote to his wife’s cruelty.
In the years that followed Elizabeth Jenkins grew in confidence;
she enjoyed teaching at King Alfred School in Hampstead, her books
were increasingly well-received, and she became part of the London
literary scene – “I wanted to have a good time,”
she says.
She never married (the passionate affairs in her life, she says,
were always with people who could not marry her), security and a
sense of belonging supplied by her beloved brothers, Romilly and
David, and by the pretty pink house in Downshire Hill.
She still misses it, and loves to reminisce about the Regency-style
drawing-room, the dining-room with its white walls and scarlet carpet
and the marble-topped side table she bought for £3 off the
pavement in Hampstead High Street. About the open fires she kept
going with wood gathered from the bottom of Keats Grove and Rosslyn
Hill.
The fire, she says, drew particularly well in her writing-room;
it was at the top of the house, and looked into the treetops. Writing
always came easily to her, and she loved it.
Does she have a favourite among her books? Immediately she says
that it is Dr Gully, the story of the Victorian doctor who was implicated
in the notorious Florence Bravo case and for whom Elizabeth Jenkins
says she fell “hook, line and sinker”.
Doctors of the first rank, she says, are always attractive. She
is quiet for a moment then says she had some successes with men,
was always going from one disastrous attachment to another, but
it was a doctor who was the love of her life and it was their relationship
that inspired her to write her novel, The Tortoise and the Hare.
“He was a surgeon and gynaecologist, Sir Eardley Holland. He
was very distinguished, handsome, charismatic. I worked during the
war in the Ministry of Information with one of his daughters, Chloe,
and she engineered a meeting with him.
“He took rather a shine to me. He wasn’t faithful to his
wife. I wondered why she didn’t value him more; so many women,
including me, would happily have changed places with her. I offered
him my heart on a plate. Yes, he made me unhappy, but it was worth
it. My feeling for him lasted after his death. It is still going
on now.”
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