PNR 290 – editorial (July-August 2026)
In October 1965 Elizabeth Jennings (the centenary of whose birth we mark this year) saved an afternoon for me. A friend had given me her latest Macmillan book. I wanted her to sign it. She was a tenant in a large first floor bedroom, if I remember, at the front of a North Oxford late-Victorian property, a prow of window jutting into the shedding trees of the avenue. Around the walls were helter-skelter bookshelves, a bed in a corner, maybe a little kitchen off, the bathroom shared. A hard sofa with cushions and stuffed animals – perhaps a doll? – faced the gas fire; behind the sofa a table burdened with books and objects. Elizabeth knew where everything was and laid her hand on the right book without hesitation. She made me tea – ‘I shall sit here, serving tea to friends’.
We talked, she signed my book, I prepared to go. She seemed a generous, eccentric woman of thirty-nine, a writer and quondam publisher, who had returned to Oxford to recover from anxiety and depression. My being an undergraduate and she a published poet did not matter at all.
As I prepared to go, she said, ‘What day will you come next week?’ What had started was going to continue.