Scovell, Edith Joy

(1907-1999)

   Born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, she was educated in Westmorland, England, and at Somerville College, Oxford. She married the ecologist Charles Sutherland Elton in 1937 and traveled with him through the West Indies and Central and South America. Most of her poetry deals with exotic places, paying meticulous attention to the flora and fauna of a given area. Her Collected Poems (1988) and Selected Poems (1991) were published by Carcanet Press. Her other publications: Shadows of Chysanthemums, 1944. The Midsummer Meadow, 1946. The River Steamer, 1956. Some of her poems: "A Wartime Story," "After Midsummer," "Bloody Cranesbill on the Dunes," "The First Year," "The Swan's Feet," "Water Images."

   Sources: Chaos of the Night: Women's Poetry and Verse of the Second World War. Catherine W. Reilly, ed. Virago Press, 1984. Washington University, St. Louis, University Libraries. Collection of Edith Joy Scovell (http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/manuscripts/mlc/scovell/scovell.html). The Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915-1955. Cecil Day Lewis and John Lehmann, eds. Chatto and Windus, 1966. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Gambit Book of Love Poems. Geoffrey Grigson, ed. Gambit, 1973. The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Michael Schmidt, ed. The Harvill Press, 1999. The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. Philip Larkin, ed. Oxford University Press, 1973. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia). Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Antholog y. Jane Dowson, ed. Routledge, 1966.