Elaine Feinstein
Elaine Feinstein | |
---|---|
Awards |
|
Elaine Feinstein
Early life
Born in Bootle, Lancashire, England, Feinstein grew up in Leicester.[3] Her father had left school at 12 and had little time for books, but he was a great storyteller. He ran a small factory making wooden furniture through the 1930s. She wrote, "An inner certainty of being loved and valued went a long way to create my own sense of resilience in later years spent in a world that felt altogether alien. I never altogether lost my childhood sense of being fortunate."[4]
Feinstein was sent to
Feinstein excelled at school work from then on. After
Literary career
Feinstein married and had three sons with her husband, Arnold Feinstein. As she resumed writing she "came to life again", keeping journals, enjoying the process of reading and writing poetry, composing pieces to help her make sense of experience.[6] She commented that she wanted "plain propositions, lines that came singing out of poems with a perfection of phrasing like lines of music."[6] She was inspired by the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva to translate some of her poetry. These poems were published by Oxford University Press and Penguin Books in 1971. She received three translation awards from the Arts Council.[6]
After 1980, when she was made a Fellow of the
Her first novel, The Circle (1970), written under Tsvetayeva's influence,[6] is "a study of a marriage, mostly through the wife's mind."[9] Several novels concern her Jewish roots: The Survivors (1982), spans the generations before and after the Holocaust, while The Border (1984) tells of an old woman in Sydney and her "painful, mysterious... escape from Vienna with her husband in 1939".[9]
Feinstein's poetry was influenced by
Feinstein travelled extensively, to read her work at festivals abroad, and as Writer in Residence for the British Council, first in Singapore, and then in
Recently asked in an interview with Alma Books what three books she would save if her house were on fire, she replied, "I'd take my iPad."[1]
Death
Elaine Feinstein died of cancer in London on 23 September 2019, aged 88. She was survived by her three sons and six grandchildren.[1]
Books
Poetry
- In a Green Eye (London: Goliard Press, 1966)
- The Magic Apple Tree (London: Hutchinson, 1971)
- At the Edge (Northamptonshire: Sceptre Press, 1972)
- The Celebrants and Other Poems (Hutchinson, 1973)
- Some Unease and Angels: Selected Poems (University Center, MI: Green River Press, 1977; Hutchinson, 1981)
- The Feast of Eurydice (London: Faber & Faber/Next Editions, 1980)
- Badlands (Hutchinson, 1987)
- City Music (Hutchinson, 1990)
- Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 1994)
- Daylight (Carcanet Press, 1997)
- Gold (Carcanet Press, 2000)
- Collected Poems and Translations (Carcanet Press, 2002)
- Talking to the Dead (Carcanet Press, 2007)
- Cities (Carcanet Press, 2010)
- The Clinic, Memory: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2017)
Novels
- The Circle (London: Hutchinson, 1970)
- The Amberstone Exit (Hutchinson, 1972). Translated into Hebrew (Keter 1984)
- The Glass Alembic (Hutchinson, 1973; New York: Dutton, 1974 as The Crystal Garden)
- Children of the Rose (Hutchinson, 1974). Translated into Hebrew, 1987
- The Ecstasy of Dr Miriam Garner (Hutchinson, 1976)
- The Shadow Master (Hutchinson, 1978; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979)
- The Survivors (Hutchinson, 1982)
- The Border (Hutchinson, 1985)
- Mother's Girl (Hutchinson, 1988)
- All You Need (Hutchinson, 1991)
- Loving Brecht (Hutchinson, 1992)
- Dreamers (London: Macmillan, 1994)
- Lady Chatterley's Confession (Macmillan, 1995)
- Dark Inheritance (London, Women's Press, 2001)
- The Russian Jerusalem (Carcanet Press, 2008)
Short story collections
- Matters of Chance (London: Covent Garden Press, 1972)
- The Silent Areas (Hutchinson, 1980)
Teleplays and radio plays
- 1975: Breath
- 1980: Echoes
- 1981: A Late Spring
- 1982: Lunch
- 1984: A Captive Lion
- 1985: Marina Tsvetayeva: A Life
- 1985: A Brave Face
- 1986: A Day Off
- 1987: If I Ever Get on My Feet Again
- 1990: The Man in Her Life
- 1993: Foreign Girls, a trilogy
- 1994: A Winter Meeting
- 1996: Lawrence's Women in Love (four-part adaptation)
- 1996: Adaptation of novel, Lady Chatterley's Confession Book at Bedtime
Biographies
- Bessie Smith: Lives of Modern Women Series, Penguin/Viking
- A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetayeva, Hutchinson, 1987
- Lawrence's Women, HarperCollins, London, 1993; Lawrence and The Women New York, 1993
- Pushkin, Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Ecco, U.S, 1998
- Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001
- Anna of all the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005; Knopf, 2006
- Portraits (Carcanet Press, 2015)
Memoirs
- It Goes With The Territory: Memoirs of a Poet, Alma Books, 2013
Translations
- Marina Tsvetayeva: Selected Poems (1971; 2nd ed., 1981; 3rd ed., 1986; 4th ed., 1993; 5th ed., 1999; 6th ed. 2009 as Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems)
- Three Russian Poets: Margarita Aliger, Yunna Morits, Bella Akhmadulina, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1976
As editor
- After Pushkin, Folio Society/Carcanet Press, 1999
In anthologies
- Contributor to A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue Between East and West, Gingko Library 2019. ISBN 9781909942288
Prizes and awards
- 1970: Arts Council Grant/Award for Translation
- 1971: Betty Miller Prize
- 1979: Arts Council Grant/Award for Translation
- 1981: Arts Council Grant/Award for Translation
- 1981: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
- 1990: Cholmondeley Award
- 1990: Shortlisted for 1990 Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize
- 1992: Society of Authors Travel Award
- 2004: Arts Council Award
References
- ^ a b c Genzlinger, Neil (4 October 2019). "Elaine Feinstein, Poet, Novelist and Biographer, Dies at 88". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 October 2019.
- ^ a b "Elaine Feinstein". British Council Literature. British Council. Retrieved 17 January 2016.
- ^ a b c Elaine Feinstein page, Carcanet Press.
- ^ a b Couzyn (1985), p. 114.
- ^ a b c Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, p. 856.
- ^ a b c d Couzyn (1985), p. 115.
- ^ Interview with Elaine Feinstein in The Times.
- ^ Feinstein biography.
- ^ a b Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy: The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (Batsford: London, 1990), p. 361.
- ^ Eltringham, Daniel (2022). Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure. Liverpool University Press. pp. 65–6.
- ^ Eltringham 2022, p. 66.
- ^ Eltringham 2022, p. 67.
- ^ A podcast of her interview with Robert Seatter is available at The Poetry Trust.
Further reading
- Jeni Couzyn, Contemporary Women Poets, Bloodaxe Books, 1985
- Donald Davie, Under Briggflatts: History of Poetry in Britain 1960–80, Carcanet Press, 1989
- Phyllis Lassner, Anglo-Jewish Women Writing the Holocaust: Displaced Witnesses, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010
- Peter Lawson, Anglo-Jewish Poetry from Isaac Rosenberg to Elaine Feinstein, Vallentine Mitchell & Co.
- Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007
External links
- Profile[permanent dead link] at Poetry Archive
- Elaine Feinstein at British Council: Literature
- Podcast interview with Elaine Feinstein at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival
- "Elaine Feinstein – Talking to the Dead", 7 May 2007. BBC Woman's Hour (audio 9 min)] "Elaine Feinstein", Tuesday 2 July 2002]
- "She Means It When She Rhymes: Marina Tsvetaeva: Selected Poems" Archived 8 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine. Review from Thumbscrew. No 17 – Winter 2000/1
- Elaine Feinstein Papers, University of Manchester Library