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Elaine FeinsteinElaine Feinstein
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BiographyPoet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator Elaine Feinstein was born on 24 October 1930 in Bootle, Lancashire. She was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Leicester.
She is the author of a number of plays for television including Breath, televised by the BBC in 1975, and The Diary of Country Gentlewoman, a twelve-part series (based on Edith Holden's novel) produced by ITV in 1984. She has also written radio plays, including Foreign Girls (1993) and Winter Meeting (1994), and is the author of several biographies, among them studies of the singer Bessie Smith and the writer D. H. Lawrence and a portrait of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, published in 2001. Her book, Anna of all the Russias: The Life of a Poet under Stalin (2005), is a biography of Anna Akhmatova.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Biography, Drama, Fiction, Poetry, Screenplay, Short stories, Translation
BibliographyIn a Green Eye Goliard Press, 1966 Selected Poems of John Clare (editor) University Tutorial Press, 1968 The Circle Hutchinson, 1970 Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva (editor) Oxford University Press, 1971 The Magic Apple Tree Hutchinson, 1971 At the Edge Sceptre Press, 1972 Matters of Chance (short stories) Covent Garden Press, 1972 The Amberstone Exit Hutchinson, 1972 The Celebrants and Other Poems Hutchinson, 1973 The Glass Alembic Hutchinson, 1973 The Children of the Rose Hutchinson, 1975 The Ecstasy of Dr Miriam Garner Hutchinson, 1976 Some Unease and Angels Hutchinson, 1977 The Shadow Master Hutchinson, 1978 New Stories Four (co-editor with Fay Weldon) Arts Council, 1979 Three Russian Poets: Margarita Aliger, Yunna Moritz & Bella Akhmadulina (translator) Carcanet, 1979 The Silent Areas Hutchinson, 1980 The Feast of Eurydice Next Editions/Faber and Faber, 1981 The Survivors Hutchinson, 1982 The Border Hutchinson, 1984 Bessie Smith Viking, 1985 Badlands Hutchinson, 1986 A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetayeva Hutchinson, 1987 First Draft: Poems by Nika Turbina (translator with Antonina W. Bouis) Marion Boyars, 1988 Mother's Girl Hutchinson, 1988 PEN New Poetry II (editor) Quartet, 1988 All You Need Hutchinson, 1989 City Music Hutchinson, 1990 Black Earth/Marina Tsvetayeva: Versions by Elaine Feinstein Delos Press, 1992 Loving Brecht Hutchinson, 1992 Lawrence's Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence HarperCollins, 1993 Dreamers Macmillan, 1994 Selected Poems Carcanet, 1994 Lady Chatterley's Confession Hutchinson, 1995 Daylight Carcanet, 1997 Pushkin Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998 After Pushkin (editor and introduction) Carcanet, 1999 Gold Carcanet, 2000 Dark Inheritance Women's Press, 2001 Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001 Collected Poems and Translations Carcanet, 2003 Anna of all the Russias: The Life of a Poet under Stalin Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005 Talking to the Dead Carcanet, 2007 The Russian Jerusalem Carcanet, 2008
Prizes and awards1970 Arts Council Grant/Award for Translation 1971 Daisy Miller Prize 1979 Arts Council Grant/Award for Translation 1981 Arts Council Grant/Award for Translation 1990 Cholmondeley Award
Critical Perspective'People have always been the centre of my concerns', Elaine Feinstein states in the preface to her recently published Collected Poems and Translations (2003). Often arising out of domestic life as well as consciousness of her Jewish identity, such humanism persists throughout her prolific writings, whether as a poet, novelist, biographer, radio and television dramatist or - perhaps most importantly - as a pioneering English translator of modern Russian poets, notably Marina Tsvetayaeva. She can be fairly regarded as a feminist, early on bringing the female body and its experiences into the territory of fable and myth. 'Calliope in the Labour Ward' places the muse of epic poetry ('she who has no love for women') within a hospital ward filled with the cries of women 'grunting in gas and air', who 'sail to a / darkness without self / where no will reaches /… [to] give birth / bleak as a goddess'. Yet alongside her literary feminism has gone a fascination with charismatic and often controversial male authors, resulting in acclaimed books about Pushkin, Brecht, D. H. Lawrence, and her recent biography of Ted Hughes.
Feinstein has subtly addressed the Jewish historical experience during the twentieth century in a variety of poems over the years. They may take the form of family occasions ('New Year'), worrying about ethical issues for British Jews regarding Israel and the Palestinians ('Hotel Maimonides'), and, during a visit to Jerusalem, 'will / the saints of the Lublin ghetto / enter your streets invisibly and / marvel at last or fear to' ('New Sadness, Old City'). Alert to undercurrents of anti-Semitism, she watches a 'dissident cabaret' in Hungary in which Einstein is mocked as a Jewish tailor: '[and] I pondered the resilience of an old monster' ('Annus Mirabilis 1989'). Jewish characters and themes animate many of her novels; The Border (1984) manages to be both tense and poignant as a couple are forced to flee from Austria when the Nazis take over, while the main female character in Loving Brecht (1992) is a Jewish cabaret singer whose turbulent emotional and political life takes her from Weimar Berlin to Stalinist Moscow, and America during the McCarthy years, all through her ambivalent involvements with Bertolt Brecht.
Feinstein's 'spare, wry, compassionate lyrics' (Ruth Padel) are impressively showcased in her Collected Poems and Translations. By her own account, Feinstein first began to write in reaction against the mainstream English poetry of the 1950s, finding it 'smugly insular'. She turned to American poets in a European modernist tradition, admiring Pound, even corresponding with Charles Olson, and her work retains something of the compression of these early stylistic sympathies. More significantly, with the encouragement of her friend Ted Hughes, she began to discover and then translate the poetry of Marina Tsvetayeva, whom she calls her greatest inspiration, though a 'dangerous example', with 'your stern assurance of the spirit'. Fifty Fifty, an anthology published this year to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Poetry Library, has selected her beautiful rendering (in 1971) of Tsvetayeva's 'Poems for Blok': 'Your name is a - bird in my hand / a piece of - ice on the tongue / …. Your name is a kiss of snow / a gulp of icy water spring water, blue / as a dove. About your name is: sleep'. Feinstein's sardonic poem, 'Dead Writers', comments: 'Russia treasures her poets, once they're dead. / In England, we depend on one another'. She has observed that her own poems usually spring from some experience in her family life. Indeed, the opening poems of her first volume, In a Green Eye (1966), concern her father, and women giving birth, ('Mother Love' and 'At Seven a Son'). Much later on in her life and poetry, 'Rosemary in Provence' shows a wonderful delicacy of feeling about old age. Driving home from a holiday in France, her husband insists on stopping the car to pick a keepsake. That gesture by implication illustrates a lifetime, as she observes 'the curious child, loving blossom / and mosses, still eager / in your disguise as an old man'.
Feinstein's novels are realist, highly readable, and often concern individuals caught up in social and political changes. She can display a lightly comic satirical touch, as in her novel All You Need (1989), set in the London media world during the summer of 1987, the high point of the Thatcherite 'enterprise culture'. Nell, a Cambridge-educated poetry-loving housewife, finds her comfortable family life turned upside down when her husband is sent to jail for fraud. She decides to rent out her house (which becomes a temporary American Air Force brothel) and moves to London with her delinquent daughter. Becoming involved with a Feminist Arts workshop, then a randy television producer, Nell has to turn detective when she discovers that her husband was framed. Along the way she also realizes 'It's my sense of self that has changed this year'.
Notwithstanding her acclaimed biographies of Pushkin and Tsvetayeva, Feinstein's most original contribution to biography has probably been her insights into the ways that charismatic male writers affect the women in their lives, and are affected by them in the development of their art. Lawrence's Women: The Intimate Life of D. H. Lawrence (1993), for instance, argues that Lawrence's need to break away from female domination, particularly that of his mother and his aristocratic wife Frieda, became a central motive in his fiction. She is properly critical of the undercurrents of anti-Semitism in Lawrence's ideas about 'blood consciousness', but abstains from joining in feminist reaction against his work, concluding 'It is the task of our generation to learn to read him again with compassion'. Ted Hughes was in some ways a latter-day Lawrentian figure, and her recent biography could almost have been entitled Hughes's Women, so persistently do women appear in his life; pre-eminently, of course, his first wife Sylvia Plath. As a Cambridge student contemporary of theirs during the 1950s, Feinstein writes with informed sympathy about the controversies surrounding them, supported by archival researches as well as plenty of anecdotes from mutual friends such as the sculptor Leonard Baskin and novelist Emma Tennant. The book's main revelations come in its account of Hughes's equally tragic love affair with the alluring but fragile Assia Wevill (originally a war-time Jewish refugee). As with Lawrence, Feinstein defends him against the onslaughts of extreme feminist critics. Less controversially, she is also in a good position to identify the importance to Hughes' poetic development of Eastern European poetry, clearly an interest she shared with him. After attending his funeral, she had a dream: 'In my mind, he was standing in our old / Cambridge kitchen, his face like mountain stone … ('Poet'). For all the authors whose lives she has written about, and whose work she has translated, Feinstein has proved to be a good advocate.
Dr Jules Smith, 2003
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