Edith Joy Scovell (9 April 1907 – 19 October 1999) was an English poet and translator.[1] Among those who admired her work were the fellow-writersVita Sackville-West andPhilip Larkin.
Edith Joy Scovell was born in Eccleshall Bierlow, nearSheffield.[2] Her father, F. G. Scovell, was Anglican rector of the village.[3] Joy was one of eight children. She studied atCasterton School,Westmorland, and atSomerville College, Oxford, graduating in English literature.[4][5]
Despite her background, Scovell ceased to be a religious believer: "I lost religion fairly early on," she told interviewer Jem Poster. "I mean religious faith – if indeed I ever had it."[4]
After a period spent working as a secretary and journalist,[6] Scovell married in 1937 the ecologistCharles Sutherland Elton, who had established the Bureau of Animal Population in Oxford. They had a daughter, Catherine Ingrid Buffonge MBE, in 1940 and a son, Robert Elton, in 1943. In general, Scovell remained reticent about private matters: "I have had a fairly ordinary life I think, with normal experiences." She died in Oxford in October 1999.[4]
E. J. Scovell published three volumes of poetry:Shadows of Chrysanthemums (1944),The Midsummer Meadow (1946), andThe River Steamer (1956). HerCollected Poems (1988,Cholmondeley Award) andSelected Poems (1991) were published byCarcanet Press.
Geoffrey Grigson, an admirer of Scovell's work, included eight of her poems in his 1949 collectionPoetry of the Present: An Anthology of the Thirties and After. He praised her observation, as "a poet less concerned with celebrity and self-importance than with being alive and in love.... The purest woman poet of our time." Philip Larkin included two, "The Swan's Feet" and "After Midsummer", inThe Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973).[4] Her poem "Child Waking" was included in thePenguin Book of Contemporary Verse (Harmondsworth, UK, 1950 and later editions). Her poem "Deaths of Flowers" is included, with reflective comment, in Janet Morley's collectionThe Heart's Time (SPCK 2011).
Another enthusiast was Vita Sackville-West, who "came across some verses of E. J. Scovell and was so much struck by them that I cut them out to stick in a private anthology."[7]
Scovell's many poems about children include "An Early Death", inspired by a grandchild who died at the age of three: "To have stood in the doorway in your shift of grace/With hands half lifted, so to have looked in/On mortal life, it is not nothing – is/A hammer stroke that rings and rings."[4]
Scovell translated some work by the late 19th-century Italian poetGiovanni Pascoli.[4]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
