author
Elinor Jenkins
A British war poet whose work was shaped by the emotional weight of the First World War, writing with feeling about loss, memory, and the human cost of conflict. Her poems carry a quiet intensity that still feels immediate today.
1 Audiobook
Poems
by Elinor Jenkins
About the author
Born in Bombay on September 3, 1893, Elinor Jenkins was the daughter of Sir John Lewis Jenkins, a senior civil servant in British India, and Florence Mildred Trevor. She was educated in England and later lived in Kew after her father's death.
Jenkins is best remembered as a British war poet. During the First World War she worked as a clerk for MI5, and the experience of the era deeply marked her writing. Her poetry, including the collection Poems by Elinor Jenkins published in 1915, reflects grief, tenderness, and the strain of wartime life rather than grand heroic rhetoric.
Her life was short: she died on October 26, 1920, at the age of 27. Even so, her poems remain part of the wider tradition of First World War writing, offering a personal and poignant voice from the period.