Elizabeth Joan Cecil Jennings was born in Boston, Lincolnshire on 18 July 1926, the younger daughter of Henry Cecil Jennings and Mary Helen Turner, who were married at Hereford in 1923.

In August 1932 when Elizabeth was aged six her father was appointed County and School Medical Officer for Oxfordshire, and the family moved to 431 Banbury Road, to the south of Five Mile Drive.

Being a Roman Catholic, Elizabeth was first sent to Rye St Antony School in Headington, but later moved on to Oxford High School. The 1939 Register shows her at the age of 13 living with her family at 431 Banbury Road, Oxford.

Elizabeth went on to read English at St Anne’s College in Oxford from 1944 to 1947.

After working in advertising, Elizabeth Jennings became an assistant at Oxford City Library, where she remained until 1958. Her first collection of poems was published in 1953.

From the summer of 1963 to the end of 1965, Elizabeth Jennings was an in-patient at the Warneford Hospital in Headington. After her discharge she remained in Headington, moving to a room in Unity House, 8 St Andrew's Lane, where she lived with the Czech refugee Rugena Stanley (known as Ruga). The house was then owned by Michael Wheeler-Booth.

In the early 1970s she moved to north Oxford where she lived in various bedsits. This Oxford Mail photograph shows her with her laundry in the Rose & Crown pub, which also functioned as a launderette.

At the end of 1995 Priscilla Tolkien found accommodation for her in Headington at 64 Birch Court, Coleman's Hill. When not writing, Elizabeth Jennings took the bus down to Oxford and sat in cafés and pubs reading most of the day. She lived at Birch Court for six years, but at the end of August 2001 she had to move to the Rosebank Care Home in Bampton after a fall.

Just two months after she moved to that care home, on 26 October 2001, Elizabeth Jennings died there the age of 75. She was buried in Wolvercote Cemetery (see grave).

Elizabeth Jennings Way, which runs from the Woodstock Road westwards and crosses the canal, is named after this poet

“Secret poets revealed” (Oxford Mail, 18 June 1998)

Oxford High School: Elizabeth Jennings

Wikipedia: Elizabeth Jennings

Note that there is a much fuller entry on Elizabeth Jennings
in the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Biography: Dana Greene, Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Elizabeth Jennings: “Port Meadow, Oxford”