Jenny Joseph
Author of Britain’s favourite postwar poem who rooted abstract insights in everyday experience
JENNY JOSEPH, who has died aged 85, was a poet whose rich and varied oeuvre became overshadowed by the hugely popular poem “Warning”. With its memorable opening, “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/with a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me”, “Warning” was voted Britain’s bestloved postwar poem in a BBC poll in 1996 (and again in 2006). It inspired people to wear purple, and a “Red Hat” society arose in America in homage.
Jenny Joseph’s dislike of the poem has been overstated, but she did dislike the colour purple: “I can’t stand it,” she explained. “That, of course, is why it’s in the poem.”
Nor is the poem a love letter to a raucous dotage: if it has anything in common with her other work, it lies in the form of dramatic monologue – an imaginative “fast-forward” written with a purple-loving persona.
For Jenny Joseph, writing poetry was a way to “hold the world” – a chance to pause the things she observed for long enough to respond to them in her own way. A more characteristic persona, in fact, is the one of Persephone, and her favourite work was a book-length poem, Persephone, a Story in Prose and Verse (1986), imagining the mythical character’s movements from below to above the earth depending on the seasons.
It was an image that recurred throughout her writing, and, although again not a directly self-revealing project, it does share with many of her poems a relationship with the changes of light, and the feeling of being in two places at once. As she wrote in “On the Embankment” (from her 1983 collection, Beyond Descartes): “Dark does not follow day, nor bleak winter summer/time is two countries using the same space/one within the other, always there./we walk a narrow path between the two/but cannot leave either, on our one hand blind / On the other the railings.”
Jennifer Ruth Joseph was born in Birmingham on May 7 1932, to Louis and Florence Joseph. Her father was an art dealer and when Jenny was still young the family moved to Buckinghamshire. During the war she was evacuated to boarding school in North Devon, where she felt an immediate affinity with the countryside, but, again, a sense of simultaneously not being part of it: “These fresh free children and green land are none of mine,” she wrote later.
At 15 she went to school in Geneva, to learn French, and she went up to St Hilda’s, Oxford, on a scholarship, in 1949. After secretarial training and travel to Italy she became a reporter, and at the end of the 1950s went to work in South Africa.
In 1959 she was asked to leave by the Minister of the Interior, when her anger at the apartheid regime became clear. She wrote of the experience: “The barbarism of white South Africa appalled me even more than the degradation and despair of black South Africa.”
Her first collection, The Unlooked-for Season,
appeared in 1960. The next year, she married Tony Coles, and their first child was born. In 1966 Coles inherited his father’s pub in Shepherd’s Bush, and the couple, by then with three children, lived above it. It was hard for family life: Jenny and the children left in 1971. The dedication to The Thinking Heart (1978) was to her children, “preventers of literature, lifesavers”.
Although she was now a single parent, this was a time of increased productivity. “Warning” had appeared in The Listener in 1961, and was anthologised in 1973 by Philip Larkin in the Oxford Book of Twentiethcentury English Verse. For a while she declined invitations to read it, or to have it included in other anthologies, and others, too, have wished that more attention could have been given to more philosophical work, such as the poems in the 1978 collection The Thinking Heart. The influence of Emily Dickinson would have been clearer, and also of Robert Browning. Still, her work shares with those poets an ability to root abstract insights in the directness of daily experiences.
By the end of the 1980s she had moved to Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire (having admired the spot on a visit to Cheltenham Literary Festival). Here she cultivated a garden, and she wrote a book about it, Led by the Nose: a Garden of Smells (2004).
The title was poignant, since her eyesight was beginning to fail and so smell was her most immediate way of engaging with the world. The volume was part reflection on nature, and part direct, characteristically precise guidance on what to plant when.
This desire for clarity, and an insistence on seeing her vision through, influenced the uncompromising care she took over her own collections, the last of which was an anthology of her love poems, Nothing Like Love (2009).
She is survived by her son and two daughters.