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Elizabeth Jenkins obituary

Sensitive novelist and biographer of strong female characters

Elizabeth Jenkins, who has died aged 104, 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.

The daughter of John Heald Jenkins, the headmaster of a boys' preparatory school in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, and his wife Theodora, Elizabeth read English and history at Newnham College, Cambridge. She then came to London and lived in a room in Doughty Street in Bloomsbury. She published her first novel when she was 23, going on to write two dozen books over the next 75 years. For 10 years she earned her living as a senior English teacher at King Alfred's school, Hampstead, and for six years she was in the wartime civil service, including two in that author's haven the Ministry of Information. Writing became her full-time career in 1945.

From the late 30s onwards, she lived in a pink-washed Regency house in Downshire Hill, Hampstead (The View from Downshire Hill was the title of her 2004 autobiography). There she eschewed modern comforts amid surroundings little different from those in Keats House across the road. As property prices started to rise to crazy levels during the 80s, Elizabeth, like many others, passed her days in a house worth a fortune without the means to run it. Yet she was uncomplaining and in many ways preferred the Victorian kitchen and one-bar electric fires.

The books she wrote included biographies of figures such as Lady Caroline Lamb (1932) and Jane Austen (1938). Her Elizabeth the Great (1958) was a pioneering work, full of feminine and personal detail. There were books about murder trials, both straight reportage and "faction" – for example Harriet (1934), which was based on the case of a girl starved to death by her money-grubbing relations, and which won the Femina Vie Heureuse prize. Dr Gully (1972), Elizabeth's favourite among her books, is about the Victorian doctor who was implicated in the 1870s Florence Bravo case.

The Tortoise and the Hare was first published in 1954.

And there were a dozen novels, in particular The Tortoise and the Hare. This book, one of the outstanding novels of the postwar period, is about a gentle, submissive, gullible woman whose arrogant, worldly husband leaves her for someone strong and manipulative, but otherwise perfectly unprepossessing. This was the only one of Elizabeth's works that was in the least autobiographical: the wounded wife was Elizabeth herself (although in reality she never married), the husband (whose Christian name was Evelyn in the novel) was the well-known gynaecologist Sir Eardley Holland, and the dreadful Blanche was a devastating portrait of the "other woman", a member of a well-known brewing family, that had to be toned down before publication.

The pain and misery that emanate from the heroine, Imogen, is one of the qualities that make the novel so memorable. The reader has complete understanding of her passive suffering, her unarticulated despair; one is angry with her inability to fight back, at the same time as empathising with it. If Elizabeth made one theme thoroughly her own, it was the power of boorishness and the weakness of unselfishness; then there was the masochism of the gentle, the sexual vigour of the oppressor. When Evelyn compares his wife unfavourably, sexually, to the red-blooded Blanche, the reader shares the point of view of all three of them.

The pain felt by Imogen was also expressed in fiction of the period by the heroines of Rosamond Lehmann. Apart from similarities of style and sensitivity, these two authors shared a deeply held belief in spiritualism: both based a book on it, in Elizabeth's case a biography of the Victorian medium Daniel Dunglas Home, The Shadow and the Light (1983), the subtitle of which was "a defence".

Also like Lehmann, Elizabeth retained an enormous interest in modern mores. Although she was apparently shy, her quietly modulated voice could lend itself to a racy anecdote. And she was not deterred by her unmarried state from basing her last novel, A Silent Joy (1992), around the theme of the evils of easy divorce. Brought up as a Methodist, she was deeply censorious of selfish divorcers – while always retaining her sympathy for them.

It was this balance that demonstrated Elizabeth's stature as a writer, and also as a person. She was extremely short (her small, hunched, awkward figure was a familiar sight in Hampstead village); she was shyly unwilling to meet one in the eye; yet she was one of the most understanding and kindly people it is possible to imagine.

Margaret Elizabeth Heald Jenkins, writer, born 31 October 1905; died 5 September 2010

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