Elizabeth Jenkins died on Sunday. She was 104 years old. Her......fondness for Jane Austen continued throughout her life. In 1940 she was a founder member of the Jane Austen Society, which aimed to buy Austen’s house at Chawton. The owner was prepared to sell, for £3,000 – a formidable sum for a group quite without resources. But in 1947, the magistrate Thomas Edward Carpenter put up the money for the purchase.
Read her biography and obituary in the Telegraph.co.uk.
Order her fascinating book and comprehensive biography, or the audio tape, Jane Austen: A biography at Amazon.com, Alibris or Audio books online.
4 comments:
Awww. What a cute old lady. I admire her for organizing over her fav book.
To live to 104 is quite an accomplishment in itself. To be a keeper, preserver and promoter of the Jane Austen Legacy sets her well above most who reach that age !
104 is amazing in itself, but what a life she had. Remarkable novels, but to rub elbows with the Bloomsbury crowd and to have a Regency-era home filled with antiques is remarkable. Her biography of Austen is still considered one of the best.
I didn't know about Elizabeth. She sounds an amazing lady.
I was interested to read about her comments on Virginia Woolf.
I'm reading Virginia Woolf's ,"Selected Diaries,"at the moment.Somebody mentioned her to me recently and partly because Hogarth House, where she lived with Leonard Woolf and began the Hogarth Press, is at Richmond, a couple of miles form where I live. I know many of the places she mentions in her diaries.
Virginia Woolf was a disturbed person and had some awful attitudes towards, "ordinary people." It was interesting to find that Elizabeth, an academic, thought Woolf horrendous and wouldn't go to see her after a while. Woolf only thought of academics as fully functioning people and she wasn't nice about most of those she knew.
I must admit, I'm finding her diaries fascinating but I would have hated to actually meet her.
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