Elizabeth Jenkins

Elizabeth Jenkins was a novelist and biographer of exceptional quality, who was sometimes the victim of her own diffidence. Not long after Virago reprinted her novel The Tortoise and the Hare (1954) in 1983, a promotional leaflet was issued with photographs or portraits of all the Modern Classics authors. Elizabeth was the only one of whom no photograph could be found, and nor would she provide one. Above her name, there appeared a Matisse-like outline of a head filled with blank space: hardly symbolic of this intensely cerebral writer.