I went down a little Elizabeth Jenkins rabbit hole after seeing a copy of her The Tortoise and the Hare in the background of a photo of her cat Miette that the writer Patricia Lockwood posted on Twitter. I read that book in 2006 and adored it, and the picture made me think I ought to look out other books by Elizabeth Jenkins. As it turns out, very little of her fiction is in print. She was also the author of several biographies and it seems like those are more widely available. In any case, I saw that she had written a memoir, which intrigued me. It was available on Amazon for upwards of $50, but I was able to order it from Abe Books for a little over $20, plus $6 to have it shipped from London, which is still a bit expensive, but not unreasonable. And so I read a second consecutive book shipped to me from London. (The two books - this and 24 Charing Cross Road have quite a bit in common also. They cover some of the same time period and several authors and places and publications pop up in both. The one that struck me most notably was St. Paul's in Covent Square, the Actor's Church, which I now really wish I had visited when I was in London.)
As the foreword, written by her nephew Sir Michael Jenkins, points out, Elizabeth Jenkins lived what was in many ways an unremarkable life, but she lived through a remarkable period (her life spanned nearly the entire 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st), was in contact with many notable figures, and is gifted with the ability to tell the episodes of her life beautifully. From 1939 until about 1995, Jenkins lived at 8 Downshire Hill in Hampstead. I looked the address up and discovered it's just around the corner from the Keats House, which I visited in London and I walked right past Jenkins' former home on my way from the Keats House to the Freud House. In fact, I remember the street well. My father and I were charmed by the Hampstead neighborhood generally. The first house we passed on leaving Hampstead Heath bore a plaque indicating that George Orwell had lived there (this was on Parliament Hill) and from there onward as we walked through the neighborhood, we paid close attention to the homes. When we came out from Keats Grove and made the left onto Downshire Hill, I remember there was a Bentley parked on the corner and I said, "That's not something you see every day." My father said that maybe it was, in London.
In any case, Jenkins' stories of her life in London from the 1920s on through the 1970s gave a wonderful picture of the times she lived through. It was also very interesting to see into her life as a reasonably successful, but not wildly famous, writer.
