About Elaine Feinstein

Elaine Feinstein (b.1930 – d.2019) was from Bootle, Lancashire and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked as an editor, a university lecturer and a journalist. From 1976 she lived on her writing. Feinstein’s early poetry bears the influence of modernists such as Pound, but it wasn’t until she began translating the great Russian poet, Marina Tsvataeva, that she found her own voice. Much of her material is drawn from personal experience, though set within the wider cultural contexts of her Jewish inheritance, feminism and European history. These influences can be detected throughout her work which, as well as her ten collections of poetry, also includes fourteen novels, several acclaimed biographies, short stories and plays for radio and television. She received a Cholmondeley Award, three Arts Council Awards and was made a Fellow of the Royal Literary Society in 1981. In 1990 she received an honorary Doctorate from the University of Leicester for services to literature.

Feinstein’s poems allow us intimate access to the fears and consolations of family life, particularly in her moving elegies to her parents and the stringent yet tender poems about her long and “bumpy” marriage. Feinstein said “People have always been the centre of my concerns,” and this statement is borne out in work that, whilst revealing the ambivalence of our relations with others, also records our rare moments of grace which flower unexpectedly like the cactus’ “blare of red” in ‘June’. She was aware that such moments are a reprieve or, as she puts it in ‘Getting Older’, “every day won from such/darkness is a celebration.” That darkness is ever-present, be it personal loss or the long shadow of the Holocaust, but it’s also what gives her poems their urgency, as it does for the dying owner of the laundrette in ‘Urban Lyric’ who “is made alert to the day’s beauty,/as if her terror had wakened poetry.”

Feinstein’s voice moves slowly through the emotional complexities of her poems, reflecting their measured pace, the discipline of their line breaks, and the pauses she uses on the page to allow time for her words to sink in. The cumulative effect is very moving and intimate – as if she is taking us into her confidence.

Her recording was made for The Poetry Archive on 17 September 2002 at The Audio Workshop, London and was produced by Richard Carrington

Featured in the Archive

Books by Elaine Feinstein

Awards

1970

Arts Council Grant/Award for Translation

Prize website
1971

Betty Miller Prize

Prize website
1979

Arts Council Grant/Award for Translation

Prize website
1981

Arts Council Grant/Award for Translation

Prize website
1981

Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

Prize website
1990

Cholmondeley Award

Prize website
1992

Society of Authors Travel Award

Prize website
2004

Arts Council Award

Prize website

Related Links

Elaine Feinstein (born as Elaine Cooklin; 24 October 1930 – 23 September 2019)[1][2] was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. A recent critic commented: "Alive to her family origins in the Russian-Jewish diaspora, she developed a close affinity with the Russian poets of this and the last century."[3] Contents 1 Early life 2 Literary career 3 Death 4 Books 4.1 Poetry collections 4.2 Novels 4.3 Radio plays 4.4 Short story collections 5 Prizes and awards 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links Early life[edit] Born in Bootle, Lancashire, Feinstein grew up in Leicester.[4] Her father left school at 12 and had little time for books, but 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."[5] Feinstein was sent to Wyggeston Grammar School for Girls by her mother, "a school as good as Leicester could provide". She wrote poems from the age of 8, which were published in the school magazine. At the end of the war Feinstein's sense of childhood security was shattered by the revelations of the Nazi extermination camps. She noted, "In that year I became Jewish for the first time."[5] Feinstein excelled at school work from then on. After Newnham College, Cambridge, she read for the bar, worked at Hockerill Training College, and then as a university lecturer at the University of Essex (1967–1970), appointed by Donald Davie.[3] Literary career[edit] 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 Tsvetayeva 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 Royal Society of Literature, she became a full-time writer. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry and an Honorary D.Litt. from the University of Leicester.[2] She visited Russia occasionally to research her books and visit friends, who included Yevgeny Yevtushenko.[4] Her writings included 14 novels, many radio plays, television dramas, and five biographies, including A Captive Lion: the Life of Marina Tsvetaeva (1987) and Pushkin (1998). Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2001) was shortlisted for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize.[7] Her biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna of all the Russias, appeared in 2005 and was translated into twelve European languages, including Russian.[8] 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 Black Mountain poets, and by Objectivists. Charles Olson sent her his "famous letter defining breath 'prosody'".[3] 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 Tromsø, Norway. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998; her poems were widely anthologised. Her Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and she was appointed to the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. She served as a judge for the Gregory Awards, the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, the Costa Poetry Prize and the Rossica Award for Literature translated from Russian, and in 1995 was chairman of the judges for the T. S. Eliot Prize.[4] Feinstein participated in the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November 2010 and continued to give readings in various countries.[10] 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[edit] 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[edit] 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 The Russian Jerusalem 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 It Goes With The Territory: Memoirs of a Poet Alma Books, 2013 Poetry collections[edit] The Clinic Memory: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, February, 2017) Cities (Carcanet Press, June 2010) Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva (Carcanet Press, 2009) Talking to the Dead (Carcanet Press, 2007) Collected Poems and Translations (Carcanet Press, 2002) Gold (Carcanet Press, 2000) After Pushkin (edited by Elaine Feinstein) (Folio Society & Carcanet Press, 1999) Daylight (Carcanet Press, 1997) Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 1994) City Music, Hutchinson, 1990 Badlands, Hutchinson, 1987 The Feast of Eurydice, Faber & Faber/ Next Editions, 1980 Some Unease and Angels, Hutchinson; 1977, reprinted, 1981 Selected Poems, University Center, Michigan, Green River Press, 1977 Three Russian Poets: Margarita Aliger, Yunna Morits, Bella Akhmadulina, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1976 The Celebrants and Other Poems, Hutchinson, 1973 At the Edge, Sceptre Press, 1972 The Magic Apple Tree, London, Hutchinson, 1971 In a Green Eye, London, Goliard Press, 1966 The Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, Oxford University Press, 1961. Second edition, 1971. Third edition, Hutchinson, 1987 Novels[edit] The Circle London, Hutchinson (Penguin 1973) The Amberstone Exit, London, Hutchinson, (Penguin 1974); translated into Hebrew (Keter 1984) The Glass Alembic, as The Crystal Garden London, Hutchinson, (Penguin 1978); New York, Dutton, 1974 Children of the Rose, London, Hutchinson; (Penguin 1976); translated into Hebrew, 1987 The Ecstasy of Dr Miriam Garner, London, Hutchinson The Shadow Master, London, Hutchinson, 1978; New York, Simon & Schuster, 1979 The Survivors, London, Hutchinson; New York, 1991 The Border, London, Hutchinson; New York, 1985 Mother's Girl, London, Hutchinson; shortlisted for 1990 Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize All You Need, London, Hutchinson; New York, 1991 Loving Brecht, London, Hutchinson Dreamers, London, Macmillan Lady Chatterley's Confession, London, Macmillan, 1995 Dark Inheritance, London, Women's Press The Russian Jerusalem, Manchester, Radio plays[edit] 1980: Echoes 1981: A Late Spring 1983: A Day Off 1985: Marina Tsvetayeva: A Life 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 Short story collections[edit] Matters of Chance, London, Covent Garden Press The Silent Areas, London, Hutchinson Prizes and awards[edit] 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 1992: Society of Authors Travel Award 2004: Arts Council Award References[edit] ^ Jump up to: a b c Neil Genzliger, "Elaine Feinstein, Poet, Novelist and Biographer, Dies at 88", New York Times, 4 October 2019. Retrieved 7 October 2019. ^ Jump up to: a b "Elaine Feinstein". British Council Literature. British Council. Retrieved 17 January 2016. ^ Jump up to: a b c Michael Schmidt: Lives of the Poets, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, p. 856. ^ Jump up to: a b c Elaine Feinstein page, Carcanet Press. ^ Jump up to: a b Couzyn (1985), p. 114. ^ Jump up to: a b c d Couzyn (1985), p. 115. ^ Interview with Elaine Feinstein in The Times. ^ Feinstein biography. ^ Jump up to: 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. ^ A podcast of her interview with Robert Seatter is available at The Poetry Trust. Further reading[edit] Jeni Couzyn, Contemporary Women Poets, Bloodaxe, 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[edit] Profile at Poetry Archive Elaine Feinstein at British Council

Elaine Feinstein Papers, University of Manchester Library

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