Elizabeth and After
1999 novel by Matt Cohen
Elizabeth and After is a novel by Matt Cohen, first published in 1999 by Knopf Canada. His final novel, it won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction just a few weeks before Cohen's death.
Plot summary.
The story is about the lives of a few people living in a small town north of Kingston, Ontario. Carl McKelvey, a "white trash male" as he describes himself, returns to the town after a three-year absence in the hope that he can live with his daughter again, and maybe even renew his relationship with his ex-wife, Chrissy. He carries deep in his heart his guilt of having driven his car into a tree, killing his mother, Elizabeth, many years earlier.
Elizabeth's sudden death ended not only an unhappy marriage she had with William McKelvey, a failed farmer, but also a secret relationship she had with Adam Goldsmith, Carl's real father. Elizabeth might have felt that the uncultured McKelvey ruined her life, or she might be too frightened to ruin her life herself by leaving him. In either case, her life has affected McKelvey, Adam and Carl so deeply that her influence is still felt eleven years later.
When Carl is attacked by Fred (Chrissy's boyfriend), Adam, even though reserved and gentle-natured, decides to do something for his son. Adam takes Fred in his car and drives him into the same tree that Elizabeth's car crashed into eleven years earlier. Both Adam and Fred are killed instantly. Carl learns about his relationship with Adam in a letter Adam left for him.
Reception.
"Elizabeth and After" received positive reviews. Kirkus Reviews described the novel as "An extremely satisfying work, finding new depth in old themes, and offering a fitting memorial to a talented, deeply humane writer." Publishers Weekly wrote that Cohen's "empathy and compassion, and his delicate depiction of loss and longing in a closely knit community, haunt his narrative."
"Booklist" also reviewed the novel.
References.
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External links.

Matt Cohen (writer)
Canadian writer
Matthew Cohen (30 December 1942 – 2 December 1999) was a Canadian writer who published both mainstream literature under his own name and children's literature under the pseudonym Teddy Jam.
History.
Matt Cohen was born in Montreal, son of Morris Cohen and Beatrice Sohn, and was raised in Kingston and Ottawa. He studied political economy at the University of Toronto and taught political philosophy and religion at McMaster University in the late 1960s before publishing his first novel "Korsoniloff" in 1969.
His fiction was translated into German, Dutch, French, Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. "The Spanish Doctor", his biggest international success, continues to sell well in the French and Spanish markets.
His greatest critical success as a writer was his final novel "Elizabeth and After" which won the 1999 Governor General's Award for English-language Fiction only a few weeks before his death. He had been nominated twice previously, but had not won, in 1979 for "The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone" and in 1997 for "Last Seen".
A founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada, he served on the executive board for many years and as president in 1986. During his presidency, the Writer's Union was finally able to persuade the government of Canada to form a commission and establish a Public Lending Right program. He also served on the Toronto Arts Council as chair of the Literary Division and was able to obtain increased funding for writers. In recognition of this work, he was awarded a Toronto Arts Award and the Harbourfront Prize.
He also published a number of children's books under the pseudonym Teddy Jam. Cohen's authorship of the Teddy Jam books was not revealed until after his death. "Dr. Kiss", illustrated by Joanne Fitzgerald won the Governor General's Award in 1991 and "Fishing Summer" was also nominated for a Governor General's Award for children's literature in 1997, making Cohen one of the few writers ever to be nominated for Governor General's Awards in two different categories in the same year.
He was married three times; first to Arden Ford, next to Susan Bricker and then to Patsy Aldana.
Cohen died at home in Toronto after a battle with lung cancer. His final book of short stories, "Getting Lucky", and his final Teddy Jam title, "The Kid's Line", were posthumously published in 2001. A Canadian literary award, the Matt Cohen Award, is presented in Cohen's memory by the Writers' Trust of Canada.
A film adaptation of his 1990 novel "Emotional Arithmetic" has been produced by Triptych films starring Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne and Susan Sarandon. It was the closing gala at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival.
Bibliography.
Years link to corresponding "year in literature" or, for poetry, to "year in poetry".
References.
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Elizabeth Scott (author)
American author of young adult novels
Elizabeth Scott (born March 15, 1972) is an American author of young adult novels.
Life.
Born in a small town, Scott grew up near Hopewell in Southern Virginia. Both of her parents were teachers, which she ended up taking classes from both of them. She majored in European Studies and met her future husband in her freshman year. Along with writing novels Elizabeth Scott has also been an editor and an office manager. She has also sold hardware and pantyhose.
References.
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Elizabeth Wilson (author)
British independent researcher and writer (orn 1936)
Elizabeth Wilson (born 1936) is a British independent researcher and writer best known for her commentaries on feminism and popular culture. She was a professor at London Metropolitan University and the London College of Fashion and is the author of several non-fiction books and fiction books. In particular, she writes on feminist politics and policy; the history of fashionable dress and dress as cultural practice; the cultures of urban life; and high culture and popular culture, especially architecture and film. Her novels "The Twilight Hour", "War Damage" and "The Girl in Berlin" are published by Serpent's Tail. She has written for "The Guardian" and "New Statesman" and was a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radio 4.
Life.
In her early life, Elizabeth Wilson's family was employed in modest positions running the British Empire. She was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, London, St Anne's College, Oxford, and the London School of Economics, where she trained as a psychiatric social worker. She worked as a social worker for 10 years, but was eventually repelled by the conservative ethos and morality surrounding psychoanalysis. She then moved on to a career in academia.
Wilson and her partner Angela [Weir] Mason were both active women's liberation movement figures in the UK. They were members of the Communist Party 1974–1990 and were campaigners for YBA Wife [Why Be a Wife?] - the Women's Liberation Movement Campaign for Legal and Financial Independence, Rights of Women, the National Abortion Campaign, and the women's refuge movement - Women's Aid. In 1984, Wilson became a co-parent when Angela [Weir] Mason gave birth to their daughter. Together with Angela [Weir] Mason she wrote "Hidden Agendas: Theory, Politics, and Experience in the Women's Movement", published in 1986.
Wilson was a prominent member of the campaign group Feminists Against Censorship. Wilson wrote for 'underground' papers of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including "Frendz", "Come Together" and "Red Rag". She was a founder member of the editorial group of "Feminist Review" (1979–1985) and a member of the editorial board of the "New Left Review" (1990–1992). From 1987 to 2001, Wilson taught cultural studies at the University of North London (now London Metropolitan University). From 1990 to 1993, she was a member of the Executive Committee of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties). Later in life, she joined the Green Party. She also wrote for "The Guardian", London, the "New Statesman" and "New Left Review", as well as broadcasting extensively for television and radio.
Her books "Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity,  The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life the Control of Disorder and Women, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts, Cultural Passions" and "Love Game: A History of Tennis from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon" may appear to cover a wide range of topics. They are united, however, by a single theme:  the importance of the aesthetic in modern life. Wilson is interested in fashion as the way in which individuals and groups can use clothing to make statements, individual and collective, to assert or to challenge authority. Her texts describe how garments are beautiful as objects in their own right while also forming a history of objects that is, in the end, the history of civilization.
For the most part, Wilson’s fiction writing is a series of linked crime novels set in the late 1940s and 1950s exploring the changed world of Britain and specifically London after 1945. Titles include: "The Twilight Hour", "War Damage, The Girl in Berlin," and "She Died Young".
Education and career.
Schooling
Employment
Visiting lectureships and professorships
Voluntary activity
Reception.
In an article for the journal "Historical Materialism", Stefan Kipfer and Kanishka Goonewardena write the following about her non-fiction book "The Sphinx in the City": "Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women","Elizabeth Wilson’s socialist-feminist approach to the city covers terrain similar to Berman’s urban Marxism. Also strongly inflected by Walter Benjamin and Jane Jacobs, her "The Sphinx in the City" is an impressively wide-ranging survey of the gendered and sexualised contradictions of urban modernity. Explicating these contradictions takes Wilson on an intellectual journey from Victorian London and Haussmann's Paris to turn-of-the-century Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Chicago and New York, and mid-century New York City. More than Berman, however, Wilson makes it clear that Euro-American metropolitan life has been infused with imperial culture and is co-defined by the world-wide experience of planning colonial and Third World cities such as Delhi, Lusaka and São Paulo. The ambiguous promise the urban experience represents for socialist feminism must thus take into account the world-wide, uneven character of modern urbanisation." Wilson's fiction has been well received. Her third novel, "The Twilight Hour", had reviews in "Time Out" London, "Bookslut", "The Independent", "Tangled Web" UK, and BookReview.com.
References.
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Elizabeth Burns (poet)
English poet and creative writing teacher
Elizabeth Burns (1957–2015) was an English poet and creative writing teacher.
Early life and education.
Elizabeth Burns was born on 14 December 1957, in Wisbech, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire. Her mother Muriel (Hayward) was from Bristol and her father, David Grieve Burns from Kirkcaldy.
Burns spent her early life in Scotland, educated at Corstorphine Primary School and Craigmount High in Edinburgh. Between 1976 and 1980 she studied English Language and Literature at the University of St. Andrews, graduating with an MA. In her twenties, living in Edinburgh, she was a leading member of the First of May Bookshop collective in Edinburgh as well as an early member of the Pomegranate women's writing group.
She spent much of her later life in Lancaster, teaching and writing, and died in August 2015 aged 57.
Poetry.
The central themes of Elizabeth Burns's work are around 'making what was invisible, visible through words and images' often delicately poised moments of home life, music, literature and art.
She published five collections of poetry as well as several pamphlets and often collaborated with other artists: potters, weaver and painters. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.
Spiral.
In 2015, one of her poems, Spiral, which is inspired by the motion of a potter's wheel, was reproduced on a 25 x 8 metre banner on the Royal Mile Edinburgh to mark National Poetry Day.
The poem appears in the latest collection of her poems "Lightkeepers", published in 2016 by Wayleave Press and compiled after her death by friends and fellow poets, Gerrie Fellows and Jane Routh.
References.
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Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
American novelist
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (August 31, 1844 – January 28, 1911) was an early feminist American author and intellectual who challenged traditional Christian beliefs of the afterlife, challenged women's traditional roles in marriage and family, and advocated clothing reform for women.
In 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, she published "The Gates Ajar", which depicted the afterlife as a place replete with the comforts of domestic life and where families would be reunited—along with family pets—through eternity.
In her 40s, Phelps broke convention again when she married a man 17 years her junior. Later in life she urged women to burn their corsets. Her later writing focused on feminine ideals and women's financial dependence on men in marriage. She was the first woman to present a lecture series at Boston University. During her lifetime she was the author of 57 volumes of fiction, poetry and essays. In all of these works, she challenged the prevailing view that woman's place and fulfilment resided in the home. Instead, Phelps' work depicted women as succeeding in nontraditional careers as physicians, ministers, and artists.
Near the end of her life, Phelps became very active in the animal rights movement. Her novel, "Trixy", published in 1904, was constructed around the topic of vivisection and the effect this kind of training had on doctors. The book became a standard polemic against experimentation on animals.
Early life.
Elizabeth (August 31, 1844 – January 28, 1911) was born in Boston, Massachusetts to American Congregational minister Austin Phelps and Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps (1815–1852). Her baptismal name was Mary Gray Phelps, after a close friend of her mother's. Her mother wrote the Kitty Brown series of books for girls under the pen name H. Trusta. Her brother, Moses Stuart Phelps, was born in 1849. Her mother was the eldest daughter of Moses Stuart, the well-known professor of Sacred Literature at Andover Theological Seminary. Her mother was intermittently ill for most of her adult life and died of brain fever shortly after the birth of their third child, Amos, on November 20, 1852, Then eight years old, Mary Gray asked to be renamed in honor of her mother.
Her father Austin Phelps was a widely respected Congregational minister and educator. He was pastor of the Pine Street Congregational Church until 1848, when he accepted a position as the Chair of Rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary. He met Elizabeth Phelps that same year and they were married in the fall. The family moved to Boston and in 1869 he became President of the Andover Theological Seminary, where he served in that role for 10 years. His writings became standard textbooks for Christian theological education and remain in print today.
Two years after her mother' death, Elizabeth's father married her mother's sister, Mary Stuart. She was also a writer but died of tuberculosis only 18 months later. Less than six months later her father married Mary Ann Johnson, the sister to a minister, and they had two sons, Francis Johnson (1860) and Edward Johnson (1863).
Phelps received an upper class education, attending the Abbot Academy and Mrs. Edwards' School for Young Ladies. She had a gift for telling stories as a child. One source noted, "She spun amazing yarns for the children she played with... and her schoolmates of the time a little farther on talk with vivid interest of the stories she used to improvise for their entertainment. At thirteen, she had a story published in "Youth's Companion" and other stories appeared in Sunday School publications.
Writing.
In most of her writings she used her mother's name "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps" as a pseudonym, both before and after her marriage in 1888 to Herbert Dickinson Ward, a journalist seventeen years younger. She also used the pseudonym Mary Adams. She gained recognition early in life from prominent literary figures including Thomas Wentworth Higginson and John Greenleaf Whittier.
At age 19 she sent a Civil War story titled "A Sacrifice Consumed" to "Harper's Magazine". The magazine editor warmly received her contribution and sent her a generous payment along with a note asking her to write for them again. In 1864 "Harpers" published her first adult fiction. She then began writing her first books for children which became known as the "Tiny series". She followed these with the four-volume "Gypsy Breynton" series, which was later recognized as her best-known juvenile writing. She also published two books that depicted the realistic adventures of a four-year-old boy named Trotty, "The Trotty Book" (1870) and "Trotty's Wedding Tour, and Story-book" (1873). Her story "The Tenth of January" appeared in "The Atlantic Monthly" in March 1868. It was about the death of scores of girls in the Pemberton Mill collapse and fire in Lawrence, Massachusetts on January 10, 1860.
Spiritualist novels.
Ward wrote three Spiritualist novels. The first, "The Gates Ajar", became her most famous. It took her two years to write. She wrote later that after she spent more than two years revising it, "I could have said it by heart." The book was finally published after the end of the Civil War. In it, she writes about a girl named Mary Cabot, whose brother was killed during the Civil War. The grief-stricken girl becomes convinced that she and her brother will be reunited in an afterlife in which people retain their physical shapes and personalities.
The book became very popular, in part from its positive portrayal of death shortly after the Civil War, during which more than 400,000 individuals lost their lives. It also received a great deal of criticism for the way Phelps depicted heaven as less a place to greet God than to be reunited with loved ones. It rejected the traditional Calvinist view of Heaven. The controversy only stimulated sales, and within a few weeks after its release, her publisher sent her a payment for $600 (about $ in today's dollars) and a note, “Your book is moving grandly. It has already reached a sale of 4,000 copies.”
Over 100,000 copies were sold in the United States and England and it was translated and reprinted in at least four other languages.
She received thousands of letters in response to the first book. She wrote two more books on the same topic, "Between the Gates" and "Beyond the Gates". She then wrote a novella about animal rights titled "Loveliness". Phelps said she wrote "The Gates Ajar" to comfort a generation of women who were devastated by the losses of their loved ones following the Civil War and who found no comfort in traditional religion. Phelps' vision of heaven made the book a run-away best seller. She later built on the success of the first Gates book with a series of other books that featured the word "Gates" in their titles and which continued to reinforce her views of the afterlife as a place with gardens, comfortable front porches, and finely built houses.
"The Gates Ajar" inspired works by other authors in the following decades, such as Mark Twain's parody "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" (1909) and Louis B. Pendleton's "Wedding Garment: A Tale of the Afterlife" (1894). The final novel in the "Gates" series was also adapted into a stage play in 1901 titled "Within the Gates".
Advocate for social reform.
While writing these and other popular stories, she became an advocate through her lectures and other work for social reform, temperance, and women's emancipation. She was also involved in clothing reform for women, and in 1874 urged them to burn their corsets.
<templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />Burn up the corsets! ... No, nor do you save the whalebones, you will never need whalebones again. Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your thorax and abdomens for so many years and heave a sigh of relief, for your emancipation I assure you, from this moment has begun.
A key influence on her writings on women's rights, especially her beliefs regarding marriage, were the works of John Stuart Mill, such as Mill's 1869 essay The Subjection of Women. Though Phelps was an avid writer on reform issues, she was not actively involved with women's rights organizations or other reform groups of the time. The progressive deterioration of her health from the 1870s onward kept her contributions mostly literary in nature rather than public.
In 1877 she published a novel, "The Story of Avis", that was ahead of its time. The work focuses on many of the early feminist issues of her era. In it she portrayed a woman's struggle to balance her married life and associated domestic responsibilities with her passion to become a painter. The protagonist is an independent, extraordinary woman in her time who initially decides her goals will not be constrained by marriage and financial dependence on a husband, although she eventually ends up marrying anyhow. She may have been reflecting her mother's life when she described the impossibility of pursuing both her artistic ambitions and adhering to her domestic responsibilities. Elizabeth's novel was largely influenced by Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. Phelps's unfavorable depiction of men's and women's roles in marriage was controversial.
In 1876 Phelps became the first woman to present a lecture series at Boston University. Her presentations were titled "Representative Modern Fiction" and they analyzed the works of George Eliot.
Social advocacy was also incorporated in Phelp's various children's literature publications as she did not attempt to conceal the inequities of the era's class structure. In stories such as "Bobbit's Hotel", "One Way to Get An Education", and "Mary Elizabeth", Phelps directly illustrates the impact of poverty on children. In "Bobbit's Hotel", the title character dies in an effort to shelter two young orphans. "Mary Elizabeth" depicts a young homeless girl's choices between theft and begging as a means of survival. "One Way to Get An Education" depicts a child laborer's desire for a better life than mill work and subsequent decision to self-injure in order to attain an education.
Later work.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and her husband co-authored two Biblical romances in 1890 and 1891. Her autobiography, "Chapters from a Life", was published in 1896 after being serialized in McClure's. She also wrote a large number of essays for Harper's Magazine.
Phelps continued to write short stories and novels into the twentieth century. Her novel "Trixy" (1904) focused on antivivisection, a cause she supported later in life. Writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate Carol J. Adams describes the novel as "important and timely." Her last work, "Comrades" (1911) was published posthumously. Phelps died January 28, 1911, in Newton Center, Massachusetts.
Selected works.
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Elizabeth Eslami
Elizabeth Eslami is an Iranian American writer of novels, essays, and short stories.
Life.
Elizabeth Eslami was born in Gaffney, South Carolina. She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Her debut novel, "Bone Worship", appeared in 2010. Her essays, short stories, and travel writing have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, The Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Millions, Matador Network and others. She is a frequent contributor to The Nervous Breakdown. Her work is also featured in the anthologies "Tremors: New Fiction By Iranian American Writers" (2013) and "Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema" (2011).
Eslami was awarded the 2013 Ohio State University Short Fiction Prize for her collection of short stories, "Hibernate," which was also a finalist for the 2011 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Eslami taught Creative Writing at Indiana University from 2014-2016. She is now the Hampton and Esther Boswell Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at DePauw University.
References.
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Elizabeth Jenkins (writer)
English novelist and biographer (1905–2010)
Margaret Elizabeth Jenkins (31 October 1905 – 5 September 2010) was an English novelist and biographer of Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Lady Caroline Lamb, Joseph Lister and Elizabeth I. Elizabeth Bowen said Jenkins was "among the most distinguished living English novelists."
Early life.
Jenkins was born on 31 October 1905 in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Her father, James Heald Jenkins, established the Caldicott School in 1904, which he named for her mother, Theodora Caldicott Ingram.
She attended the Modern School and St Christopher School, Letchworth and the women-only Newnham College, Cambridge from 1921, a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, where she studied English and history, though women were not eligible to receive a degree from the university until 1948.
She took a position teaching English at King Alfred School in Hampstead in 1929. In 1939, when World War II started, she left her teaching position and worked assisting Jewish refugees and London air-raid victims for the Assistance Board. She later worked in government positions for the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Information.
After the war, she was a reader for Gollancz, her publisher, and recommended John Braine’s Room at the Top, for publication.
Writing career.
Novelist.
Through Newnham's principal Pernel Strachey she met Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf, who would later call her first novel "Virginia Water" (1929) "a sweet white grape of a book". She sent her first novel to Victor Gollancz Ltd. When he realised it was the first thing she had written, he immediately gave her a contract for three books.
Her 1934 novel, "Harriet" (republished by Valancourt Books in 2015), a fictionalised account of the murder of Harriet Staunton whose relatives starved her to death to get to her inheritance, won the Prix Femina. She beat Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust and Antonia White's Frost in May to the prize. The novels "Doubtful Joy" followed in 1935 and "The Phoenix' Nest" in 1936. Other novels include "Robert and Helen" (1944) and "A Silent Joy" (1992).
"The Tortoise and the Hare" (1954) is Jenkins' most successful novel. In his review John Betjeman said, "I do not think there is a sentence in this book out of character." It is about a marriage that was deeply troubled despite surface appearances. It was praised by Hilary Mantel in "The Sunday Times" as showing that Jenkins "seems to know a good deal about how women think and how their lives are arranged".
Her 1972 novel, "Dr. Gully's Story", Jenkins' favourite, retold the story of the 19th-century physician James Manby Gully, whose affair with Florence Bravo, and the subsequent poisoning death of her husband Charles Bravo, led to never-proven suspicions that Gully had committed murder.
Biographer.
Jenkins published the first biographies of Lady Caroline Lamb in 1932 and of Jane Austen in 1938. She was involved in the establishment of the Jane Austen Society in 1940 and worked to purchase Austen's home in Chawton where she wrote "Emma" and other novels, and which later became the site of Jane Austen's House Museum.
Her 1958 biography, "Elizabeth the Great", "showed her biographical talents at their most effective" and provided what "The New York Times" called "a psychological dimension to her portrait that other historians had scanted", an attribute that could also be seen in her 1960 book "Joseph Lister". A. L. Rowse said that her biography of Elizabeth I "got nearer to penetrating the secret of the most remarkable woman in history than any other". In her 1961 book "Elizabeth and Leicester", Jenkins presented her hypothesis that the violent ends of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard had made Elizabeth unable to establish a full sexual relationship with Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester because she associated sex with death.
Later life.
In all, Jenkins wrote a dozen novels and a dozen biographies. She was awarded an OBE in 1981. Her 2004 memoir "The View from Downshire Hill" recounted her decades of living in a Regency architecture home she bought in Hampstead. She moved into the house in 1939 and decorated it with Regency style furniture that she had acquired inexpensively in the years following World War II from period houses that had been damaged during the war. She would later say that, based on her decor, "people assumed I was comfortably off, instead of being very hard up".
Towards the end of her life, Jenkins told a journalist she had had an affair with the prominent gynaecologist Sir Eardley Lancelot Holland. Holland was the basis of the character Eardley in Jenkins' "The Tortoise and the Hare", which Jenkins said was an autobiography "not in fact, but in feeling."
Jenkins died at the age of 104 on 5 September 2010 at a nursing home in Hampstead, London, where she had resided in the years before her death. She never married. She told Virginia Nicholson, "I just shuddered at the idea of childbirth, and then went on to something else."
References.
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Elizabeth Gregory
University professor of home science
Elizabeth Gregory (4 March 1901 – 22 October 1983) was a New Zealand university professor of home science. She was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, on 4 March 1901.
In 1953, Gregory was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal. In the 1961 New Year Honours, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
One of Gregory's students was professor of education, Barbara Calvert.
References.
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Elizabeth Ruth
Canadian novelist
Elizabeth Ruth (born 1968) is a Canadian novelist.
Early life and education.
Elizabeth Ruth was born in Windsor, Ontario, was raised by a single, unmarried mother, and moved frequently while growing up, including living in Detroit, Michigan, in Canada, and in Bogota, Colombia. Those early years shaped her, she says, and offered the best informal education one could have in resourcefulness, survival, and love. Formally, she earned an Honours BA in English Literature and Women's Studies (University of Toronto) an MA in Counselling Psychology [University of Toronto] and an MFA in Creative Writing (University of Guelph).
Career.
Before becoming a published writer, Elizabeth Ruth worked for over a decade in the field of front line mental health and in homeless shelters with women and children.
Her debut novel, "Ten Good Seconds of Silence", was nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the City of Toronto Book Award in 2001. Her second novel, "Smoke", was published in 2005 and later chosen as the winner of the One Book One Community Program. (Waterloo, Ontario region). Both novels are published by Random House in Germany. In 2013 Elizabeth Ruth published a third novel, Matadora, to critical acclaim. Her fourth novel, Semi-Detached is forthcoming in 2023.
Elizabeth edited the anthology, Bent On Writing: Contemporary Queer Tales, based on work by LGBTQ2+ writers presented at her long-running reading series. She published a GoodReads novella in plain language for adult literacy learners, entitled, Love You To Death.
Elizabeth Ruth is well known for her mentorship of aspiring writers through the Humber School for Writers’ Correspondence Program, Diaspora Dialogues, Writers in Electronic Residence, and various writer-in-residencies. She is a favourite at bookclubs, libraries, author events.
Openly lesbian, Ruth also curated a monthly reading series for five years, "Clit Lit", for Canadian LGBTQ+ writers in Toronto.
In 2019 Elizabeth was chosen to be the Berton House writer-in-residence in Dawson City, Yukon. She has served in the role of writer-in-residence at numerous public libraries and with various organizations. Ruth is a member of the Writer's Union of Canada, and served on the author's advisory committee of the Writers' Trust of Canada for many years.

Elizabeth Banks (journalist)
American journalist
Elizabeth Brister Banks (May 2, 1865 – July 18, 1938) was an American journalist and writer. Although she never renounced her American citizenship, she remained in England throughout the last forty years of her life.
Biography.
Elizabeth was born in Trenton, New Jersey, the daughter of John Banks and Sarah Ann Brister. As a young child, she was raised by her aunt Elizabeth Brister and uncle Joseph Peck on "the experimental farm" north of Madison, Wisconsin, near Deansville. She attended Milwaukee Downer Female Seminary College in Milwaukee when it was still located at Fox Lake, Wisconsin.
She became a typewriter girl in a grocery store, then worked society pages in Baltimore and Saint Paul, Minnesota. She worked as secretary at the American Consulate in Peru, later becoming a stunt girl journalist when other women writers were relegated to society and fashion pages.
Unable to find reliable work in the United States, Banks moved to England in 1893. There, she undertook an undercover investigation into the lives of domestic services which she published in the "Weekly Sun" under the byline "American Girl in London"; the series of seven articles was later published as a book titled "Campaigns of Curiosity". Referring to her immediate success, George Robert Sims noted the author was "the charming lady journalist who has made the biggest score out of the disguise business since the days of the Amateur Casual". Journalist William L. Alden, however, criticized Banks not for the deception of working undercover but for sharing details about British families. As he wrote, the stories were "certainly not in accordance with the ethics of decent London journalism" and "were generally thought to be in extremely bad taste".
She continued to work in London, where she became a regular contributor to publications such as "The Daily News", "Punch", "St James' Gazette", "London Illustrated", and "Referee". She created a sensation in London by recording her observations on the plight of the lower classes, which she researched posing as a housemaid, street sweeper, and Covent Garden flower girl. Her journalistic writing under several pen names including pseudonyms of Mary Mortimer Maxwell and Enid, unceasingly promoted women's right to vote and denounced prison conditions for jailed suffragettes.
Elizabeth lived in London at 17 Downing Street, close to the Prime Minister's residence. Her neighbors and friends included George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells and suffragette Henrietta Marston. She made major contributions to British Intelligence in developing strategies to help protect London from German aerial attacks and developing propaganda schemes that helped draw the United States into the first world war. According to "Who's Who in America" (volume 20, 1938) "in 1914 she founded the Authors' Belgian Fund and Dirk's fund for the Allies. She originated and also wrote a series of controversial essays entitled "The Lady at the Round Table"".
She made a trip back to the United States and wrote an autobiographical work, "The Remaking of an American" (1928), which followed up previous autobiographies "Campaigns of Curiosity" (1894) and "Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl" (1902). Careful to protect her sources in both her letters and written works, the bulk of her personal papers were destroyed upon her death. She died on July 18, 1938, of arteriosclerosis, then was cremated and her ashes deposited at Golders Green Crematorium.
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Elizabeth Lawrence (writer)
American writer and landscape architect
Elizabeth Lawrence (May 5, 1904 – June 11, 1985), was an American horticulture writer and landscape architect. In 1932, she became the first woman to graduate with a degree in Landscape Architecture from (present-day) North Carolina State University. She is best known for her columns and books on Southern gardening. Lawrence wrote for "House & Garden", "The American Home", and "Southern Home and Garden", and more than 700 columns for "The Charlotte Observer".
Her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Elizabeth Lawrence House and Garden is recognized by the National Register of Historic Places and is part of the Wing Haven Gardens and Bird Sanctuary.
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Elizabeth E. Wein
American writer
Elizabeth E. Wein (, born October 2, 1964) is an American-born writer best known for her young adult historical fiction. She holds both American and British citizenship.
Personal life.
Elizabeth E. Wein was born in New York City on October 2, 1964. She moved to England when she was three. When she was six, her father, Norman Wein, was sent to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, where she lived from 1970 to 1973. As a child, she was fluent in Jamaican Patois.
Wein moved back to the United States when her parents separated, and she was raised by her mother Carol Flocken in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania until her death in a car accident in 1978, after which Wein lived with her maternal grandparents. She wrote her first novel at age 11. Wein attended Yale University and, after a year of work-study in England, spent seven years getting a PhD in Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. Wein moved to England with her English husband Tim in 1995 and settled in Scotland in 2000. She and Tim have two children.
Wein has a passion for planes, and she possesses a private pilot licence which she received in 2003.
Writing career.
Wein's first five books recount a version of the King Arthur stories which moves the narrative to the Kingdom of Aksum in 6th century Ethiopia. The stories focus on her interpretation of Medraut (Mordred) and his half-Aksumite, half-British son Telemakos.
Her 2012 novel, "Code Name Verity", is a World War II thriller focusing on the friendship between an English woman, a Scottish woman, a transport pilot and a spy. It received critical acclaim; it was awarded an Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Novel and designated a Michael L. Printz Award Honor book in 2013. A follow-up novel, "Rose Under Fire", also set in World War II, tells the story of an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot who is captured and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Wein's short stories have been published in collections edited by Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, and Sharyn November. She is a regular reviewer for the "New York Times Book Review."
Works.
Novels.
"Code Name Verity" sequence.
These novels take place before or during World War II and share a number of recurring characters.
References.
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Elizabeth Savage (writer)
American novelist
Elizabeth Savage (née Fitzgerald; February 15, 1918 – July 15, 1989) was an American novelist and short-story writer. In nine novels, she explored the turbulent decades between 1930 and 1980 in the Western United States and along the Atlantic Coast. Her work focuses on men and women dealing with the Great Depression, World War II, the birth of the women’s movement, the Sixties counterculture and the Vietnam War. Among her best-known books are "The Last Night at the Ritz", the semi-autobiographical "The Girls from the Five Great Valleys", "Summer of Pride", "But Not for Love", "A Fall of Angels", and "Happy Ending".
Savage was married for 50 years to the equally celebrated novelist Thomas Savage, with whom she had three children. In novels such as "But Not For Love," she captures the stresses caused by class distinctions, economic differences and male/female relationships within groups of friends or extended families, whether the combatants live in Maine beach colonies, remote Idaho ranches or Montana college towns. She also focuses on complex female friendships, stretching over many years. A strong sense of place permeates all her work. Three of Savage's novels illuminate the American West, where she spent much of her childhood. Others are set in Maine, where she lived most of her adulthood.
Early life.
Savage was born in Hingham, Montana. She was the daughter of Mildred Ridlon and Brassil Fitzgerald. Her father was an English professor and freelance writer. “He was a harbinger of this peripatetic century;” she once said. “He attended Boston College, the University of Arizona and Stanford before he taught first at Utah and then Montana. So I grew up thinking of myself primarily as a westerner and was not surprised to marry one—although we met in the east.”
Known as “Betty” to her family and friends, Savage graduated from Missoula County High School in Missoula, Montana, and went east to enroll at Colby College, Waterville, Maine, in 1937. That summer, she began exchanging letters with “a friend of a friend,” the young man who would become her husband. Thomas (then known as Thomas Brenner) was from Horse Prairie, Montana. Although he had been a student of her father’s at the University of Montana, Missoula, he had never met Elizabeth. After months of letters, he hopped on a Greyhound bus and traveled from Montana to Boston, where he met his future wife and her mother at the Copley Plaza Hotel, a scene she later fictionalized in her best-known novel, "The Last Night at the Ritz".
Afterwards, Thomas joined Elizabeth at Colby College. The couple married in 1939, while still students, and received B.A. degrees in 1940. She graduated magna cum laude. The Savages lived in Chicago, Montana and Massachusetts before settling down in Maine, their home for the next thirty years.
During the Maine years, both Savages established "big literary careers as novelists." Each published nine novels. In 1985, they moved to Whidbey Island, Washington, where Thomas had a recently discovered sister. Elizabeth died there in 1989. She was 71 years old.
Career.
Savage wrote her first novel, "Lacquer Lady", at the age of 10, featuring not only a “sophisticated young woman who wore black but also “Binky, an older man of 18.” She won a National Scholastic prize for “The Master in the House,” a one-act play set in Hingham, her birthplace.It was later published by Samuel French.
After she married and got busy raising children, Savage wrote mainly poetry. She sold a story based on her husband’s grandmother,“The Sheep Queen of Idaho,” to the Saturday Evening Post for $1,000—a princely sum at the time. She was 42 years old before she published her first novel, "Summer of Pride" in 1960. The second novel, "But Not for Love," came ten year later.
”But once she was freed up, she wrote quite rapidly," said her husband.
Seven novels followed, sometimes one a year. She also wrote for Writer magazine, Paris Review, Redbook and Saturday Evening Post.
Savage's last work has a prophetic name, "Toward the End". She died in Washington State in 1989, nine years after its publication.
Asked about her influences, Savage listed William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens. Her interest in Victorian literature is reflected in "Willowwood:" A Novel, (1978), an exploration of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood focused on the complicated relationship between artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his muse Elizabeth Siddal.
In 2012, Nancy Pearl sparked new interest in Savage's work when "The Last Night at the Ritz" became a Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries imprint. A line from the novel had been a favorite of Pearl's for many years. "It is very dangerous to get caught without something to read." Pearl notes that "The Last Night In the Ritz" is set in the "Mad Men" era and "there's a lot of drink, everyone smokes (cigarettes) and fornication, not to say adultery, is hardly an unknown event."
"Last Night at the Ritz" displays a "delicate interplay of past and present that is a pure delight ... " wrote Martin Levin in The New York Times. "The nostalgic aura surrounding these happenings is strong enough to make Elizabeth Savage's novel glow in the dark." Time magazine said that "In a very short compass, with extraordinary deftness, humor and a rueful shrewdness edging toward wisdom, it rises above its genre to something not unlike small genius."
"Published in 1973 and set in the late 1960s, "The Last Night at the Ritz" is both intensely of its time and also, in important ways, absolutely timeless," notes the "Library Journal."
"The Girls From the Five Great Valleys" became a Book Lust Rediscoveries in 2014. Built around five young women on the brink of adulthood in Missoula, Montana, it is set during the Great Depression and contrasts five stable families with the poverty around them. The main themes are chance and "the terrible inexorability of change."
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Elizabeth Williams (educationist)
British mathematician and educationist
Elizabeth Williams (née Larby, formerly Emily May; 29 January 1895 – 29 March 1986) was a British mathematician and educationist.
Life.
Williams was born on 29 January 1895 in Pimlico, London. She studied in Chelsea and Forest Gate during her childhood, and at the age of 16 began attending Bedford College, University of London for a college degree.
At Bedford, one of her mentors was Alfred North Whitehead. She became a grammar school teacher, but had to stop teaching when she became married in 1922.
Because of this situation, she founded her own school in North London with her husband, and then in 1930 (with the assistance of Percy Nunn, who had been a former tutor) she took a position in education at King's College London.
She became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1958, and president of the Mathematical Association for 1965–1966.

Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop
American writer (born 1979)
Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop (born 1979) is an American writer.
She was born in New York City in 1979. She attended Harvard University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and "summa cum laude" in 2001, with a B.A. in English and American Literature and Language. She earned an M.F.A. degree in fiction from the University of California, Irvine in 2004, where she was the recipient of the Schaeffer Writing Fellowship.
In addition to her novels, she has written short fiction for "Wind", "The Evansville Review", "The Missouri Review", "The Red Rock Review", and "Indiana Review". She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts with her husband and daughter, and she is Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at Endicott College.
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Lady Elizabeth Montagu
British writer (1917–2006)
Lady Elizabeth Montagu (4 July 1917 – 10 January 2006), known as Betty Montagu, was a British novelist, nurse, and art collector. The daughter of the 9th Earl of Sandwich and American heiress Alberta Sturges, she grew up at Hinchingbrooke House in Huntingdon and was educated at North Foreland Lodge. A prominent debutante in the 1930s, she was active in the London Season before World War II. When war broke out in Europe, she volunteered as a nurse, heading the casualties department at St Thomas' Hospital in London. After the war ended, she served on the teaching staff at the Royal College of Nursing until 1950.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Lady Elizabeth was a celebrated novelist. She published three novels through Heinemann, "Waiting for Camilla" in 1953, "The Small Corner" in 1955, and "This Side of the Truth" in 1947. In 1958 she published an English translation of Carl Zuckmayer's 1955 drama "Das kalte Licht". Lady Elizabeth also wrote contributing pieces for various British magazines, including "Encounter". Her final work, a collection of short stories titled "Change, and Other Stories", was published in 1966. She succumbed to alcoholism and never wrote again. Her work was praised by Sir John Betjeman, John Davenport and Graham Greene, and she received glowing reviews in "The Times Literary Supplement" and the "New Statesman".
Lady Elizabeth was also an amateur artist who painted country scenes and drew portraits of her friends. She was an avid art collector and, along with maintaining a large art collection she inherited from her father, she collected works by Graham Sutherland, Sir Sidney Nolan, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews.
Early life and family.
Lady Elizabeth Montagu was born on 4 July 1917 in London, the youngest child of George Montagu, 9th Earl of Sandwich and Alberta Montagu, Countess of Sandwich. She was a younger sister of Victor Montagu, 10th Earl of Sandwich, The Honourable William Drogo Sturges Montagu, and Lady Mary Faith Montagu. Her paternal grandfather, Rear Admiral The Honourable Victor Montagu, was an officer in the Royal Navy and a godson of Queen Victoria. Her paternal great-grandfather was Charles Yorke, 4th Earl of Hardwicke. On her mother's side, Lady Elizabeth was the granddaughter of Betty Leggett and a descendent of the American judge Jonathan Sturges. She was a grandniece of Josephine MacLeod, who, like her mother and grandmother, was a devotee of the Hindu monk and philosopher Swami Vivekananda.
Lady Elizabeth grew up at Hinchingbrooke House, the family's ancestral seat in Huntingdon. She was educated at North Foreland Lodge, a boarding school for girls in North Foreland, and went on to study German language in Munich. She was presented as a debutante in the 1930s and was a model for Pond's cold cream advertisements. Her time in Munich was spent over two months in 1939, prior to the invasion of Poland. Lady Elizabeth later told Rachel Johnson, "I'm afraid I didn’t give a thought to what was going on outside. I was sleeping, eating, chatting, dining, dancing. That was all."
Career.
Nursing.
During World War II, Lady Elizabeth volunteered as a nurse and was head of casualties at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Sir John Rupert Colville wrote in his diaries that, while off-duty from hospital work, Lady Elizabeth "talked a lot of nonsense about religion and the ineffectiveness of our propaganda in America." She and Colville took shelter during The Blitz in September 1940, when they were lunching in Hyde Park and "shells burst over" their heads. Lady Elizabeth worked at St. Thomas' Hospital until 1946, and was on the teaching staff of the Royal College of Nursing from 1947 to 1950.
Writing.
She was an acclaimed novelist, and wrote "Waiting for Camilla" in 1953, "The Small Corner" in 1955, and "This Side of the Truth" in 1957. In 1966 she published "Change, and Other Stories". Her novels were all published by Heinemann. The English poet Sir John Betjeman called her novel "The Small Corner" a "clever and subtle novel". English critic and book reviewer John Davenport called the novel "strangely compelling... a study of a woman who is self-righteous to the point of mania." The writer Graham Greene said Lady Elizabeth "does a very difficult thing, triumphantly" in her writing of "This Side of the Truth" and that she "writes with cool detachment, pinning down futility with the point of an acid pen" in "Waiting for Camilla". As well as a novelist, Lady Elizabeth was a contributor to various magazines including "Encounter". In 1958 she translated Carl Zuckmayer's 1955 drama "Das kalte Licht" ("The Cold Night") from German to English. Her works were praised by "The Times Literary Supplement" and the "New Statesman". She would write while staying in a cottage in Dorset next to an apple orchard.
Personal life.
Lady Elizabeth was an art collector, collecting works by Graham Sutherland, Sir Sidney Nolan, Frank Auerbach, and Michael Andrews. She inherited a large collection of paintings and other art objects from her father's collection, and also was an amateur painter herself, painting country scenery and sketching portraits of her friends.
She described herself as a socialist and as an agnostic, but remained politically neutral if not conservative in practice. She never married, and built a house in the South of France with her friend Anne Balfour-Fraser. An alcoholic, she went to live with the shipping heiress Charlie Delmas in Mougins while she recovered.
Lady Elizabeth owned a flat in Battersea, where she spent the last years of her life. She died in London on 10 January 2006.
A film about her life, "The Honourable Rebel", was released in 2015.
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Elizabeth Isichei
New Zealand historian and academic (born 1939)
Elizabeth Mary Isichei (née Allo; born 22 March 1939) is a New Zealand author, historian and academic.
Early life, family and education.
Isichei was born Elizabeth Mary Allo in Tauranga, New Zealand, on 22 March 1939, the daughter of Albert (an agricultural scientist) and Lorna Allo. She was educated at Tauranga College, and attained the highest marks in New Zealand in the 1955 university entrance scholarship examinations. She went on to study at the University of Canterbury, from where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1960 and won a senior university scholarship. She then completed a Master of Arts with first-class honours in history at Victoria University of Wellington in 1961. Her honours thesis formed the basis of her book, "Political Thinking and Social Experience", published in 1964. She won a Commonwealth Scholarship and, after a brief period as a temporary assistant lecturer in history at the University of Canterbury, undertook doctoral studies at Nuffield College, Oxford. Her DPhil thesis, completed in 1967, was titled "Quakers and society in Victorian England".
At Oxford, Allo met Peter Isichei, a chemical pathologist. The couple became engaged in 1963, and married on 23 July 1964, going on to have five children.
Academic career.
Elizabeth Isichei was a professor in the Department of History at the University of Jos in Nigeria from 1976, and was general editor for "Jos Oral History and Literature Texts". She has said that having both a family and career "would not have been possible if my husband had not gone to any lengths to help and encourage me". She was a visiting fellow at the University of Canterbury in 1984, and in 1992 was appointed a professor of religious studies at the University of Otago. On her retirement from Otago in 2006, she was accorded the title of professor emeritus.
Her works and books are centred on Christianity in Africa and the history of Nigeria particularly the Igbo people, including a biography of Michael Tansi, the first Nigerian Trappist monk. She also wrote on contemporary developments in New Zealand Catholicism, and on the religious meanings of Colin McCahon's art.
In 1992, Isichei was awarded a Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Canterbury. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1997, but no longer holds that fellowship.
Poetry.
Before going to Oxford in 1962, Allo established a reputation as a poet, with her work appearing in publications including the "Listener", "Landfall", "Comment" and the "Poetry Yearbook". She returned to poetry in the 1990s, and her poems were published in the "Listener", "Winterspin", and various anthologies, as well as her own published collections.
Later life.
Isichei's husband, Peter Isichei, died in 2023.
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Elizabeth College, Guernsey
The Royal College of Elizabeth, better known as Elizabeth College, is a co-educational independent school in Saint Peter Port, Guernsey. A member of the HMC (The Heads' Conference), it is a public school in the British sense of the term. Founded on 25 May 1563 by royal charter from Elizabeth I, it is one of the oldest schools in the British Isles and the oldest public school in the Channel Islands.
The school endured a turbulent two and a half centuries after its foundation, with several principals being dismissed or resigning following disputes with the local authorities. In 1824, it was re-chartered with new staff and an improved curriculum to attract fee-paying pupils from England. During the German occupation of the Channel Islands, the school was evacuated to Great Hucklow, Derbyshire. Having been a boarding school since its foundation, the decline in the number of pupils admitted as boarders following the world war period meant the school became a day school in 1996. The school became co-educational in 2021.
The school teaches around 570 pupils aged 11 to 18. As a selective school, prospective pupils must pass an entrance exam to be offered a place, although the school accepts pupils from a wide ability range. The school charges £5,216 per term, with three terms per academic year, (or £15,648 per annum) as of 2024/2025. There is an associated junior school for ages 2½ to 11 on adjoining sites at the nearby Acorn House (pre-school), in King's Road, and Beechwood (primary school), in Queen's Road.
Alumni of the school are known as Old Elizabethans. Since 1824, pupils have been allocated a unique, sequential school number. Among these alumni are multiple Olympians, several Bailiffs of Guernsey and other notable persons. Noted in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries for producing students who later joined military colleges in the UK, the school's alumni includes four Victoria Cross recipients.
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History.
Foundation.
In the mid-sixteenth century, the Queen's Commissioners raised concern over the civil, political and religious administration of Guernsey. In the year the school was founded, three people were burned for witchcraft. The Privy Council thought, therefore, that the island required secondary education in the hope that students might go on to preach as clergymen on the island in line with principles of the Protestant Reformation. They recommended the establishment of a school by royal charter, whereby a free grammar school would be founded by the States of Guernsey with a master appointed by the island's Governor. The school was founded on 25 May 1563 as Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School by a patent roll from Elizabeth I which read:
Also since there is no grammar school in the isle, to erect a free grammar school there called Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School under the seal of the isle; the schoolmaster thereof to be appointed and removable by the Captain (except the Queen shall otherwise order); the school to be endowed with wheat rentes of 80 quarters a year found to belong to the Queen by the late Commissioners.
It was the fourth school to be established on the island. To create a site for the school, Franciscan friars were moved from land at La Rue Des Frères. The first schoolmaster was Belgian scholar, Adrian Saravia. Saravia left the island by 1571, describing the local population as an "uncivilised race" which "hates all learning". Over the next two and a half centuries the school struggled to survive, in large part due to shortcomings with the statutes on which the school was founded: the raising of funds was a near-constant issue, with buildings being abandoned and land alienated; principals (then known as masters) came and went; the pupil roll never exceeded 29 and, for several periods, there were no students at the school at all.
Reform and reconstruction.
In 1824, due to increased demand for a higher standard of local education, including at the school, the island's Lieutenant Governor, John Colborne, established a committee to review the school. It was re-chartered that year, and on 19 October 1826 the foundation stone of a new school building to be designed John Wilson was laid by Colborne and the school was renamed the Royal College of Elizabeth. The reform introduced a register of pupils, whereby pupils are allocated a unique, sequential school number.
After the re-chartering, Charles Stocker was appointed principal and developed a reputation for flogging. He set out to raise the academic standing of the school and oversee the construction of the new main building. In the school's first year after the re-chartering, there were more than 100 boys on the school roll. However, over the next couple of years, the number of new entrants decreased to as low as 17 in 1827. In 1829, three years after the laying of the foundation stone, the new building was ready for use.
The school expanded its teaching and extra-curricular facilities in the latter half of the nineteenth century, building a gymnasium on the main site and purchasing fields in Kings Road for a cricket ground which was completed in 1888. The original school building was converted into a science laboratory. Some of the biggest developments came under principal William Penney, appointed in 1888, who identified faults with the quality of teaching and attended to the school's main building which was badly in need of repair. Penney revised the syllabus, introduced masters' meetings to be held twice a term and had reports sent to parents every half term. He revised the punishment system too, only allowing himself and the vice-principal to use the cane, oversaw the reincarnation of "The Elizabethan" magazine, and formed the Old Elizabethan Association, which set about wiping the school's debts by 1898 through a variety of money-raising ventures.
World war period.
In the nineteenth century, the school gained a reputation for catering for the sons of British government officials employed across the British Empire, many of whom followed distinguished colonial careers. In this era, the school was noted for producing students who would later join military colleges in the United Kingdom. 662 alumni served in World War I, 105 of which were known to have been killed and many more died of injuries sustained in battle, meaning approximately one in five of all the boys who had joined the school since the re-chartering had served in the Great War. A roll of honour is displayed in the main hall to commemorate those who fought and died in the war. Four alumni have been awarded the Victoria Cross: Duncan Home in 1857, John McCrea in 1881, Lewis Halliday in 1900 and Wallace Le Patourel in 1943.
In 1939, the school remained largely unaffected by the transition from peace to the Phoney War, with many believing the Channel Islands to be the safest place in the British Isles. Precautionary measures were taken nonetheless: air-raid shelters were dug in front of the school's main building and black-out regulations required some school activities and societies to be curtailed. The air-raid shelter was later converted by German forces into a secure holding area for weapons and ammunition. Following developments in the war in May 1940, senior boys were required to join the Local Defence Volunteers and came to school with rifles slung across their shoulders. Many school activities continued uninterrupted at this point, with cricket and swimming continuing in the unusually fine weather. In June however, the extent of the dangers of war were realised. French resistance collapsed, after which the island's army and RAF units left the island. Fearing imminent occupation by German forces, an evacuation scheme was quickly assembled by the school governors with Jersey and the Home Office. On the evening of Thursday, 20 June the school was evacuated to Great Hucklow, Derbyshire, where it would spend five years during which pupils had little or no contact with their parents.
At the start of the occupation, the school buildings were home to the States Controlling Committee, but in 1941 the German authorities demanded the use of the school buildings as its headquarters. A strongroom bunker was built inside what is now the 'AJ Perrot' room, which remains to this day, albeit without the door. Despite the shortages in staff, facilities and money, eight pupils receiving scholarships to the University of Oxford in this period. The official liberation announcement by Brigadier Alfred Ernest Snow was made from the steps of the school in 1945 to a crowd of cheering locals. However, it was not until August that boys were able to return home and continue their education on island. German prisoners of war were tasked with cleaning up and repairing the damage to the building, which was not as bad as feared initially.
Modern period.
The school's uptake increased at such a rate after the war that, for the first time since 1829, the main building was too small to accommodate the students. Rapid development followed, including the purchase of Beechwood, a former nursing home, in 1948 which was converted into a boarding house. A squash court was added, the nearby Grange Club was purchased in 1950 and converted into a library, land was acquired at Footes Lane for a cricket field and a new science block was built.
The 1990s saw the refurbishment of the science laboratories, improved facilities for sport and physical education and the development of a purpose-built art department. In 1992, the school accepted a group of girls into the sixth form from the relocating Blanchelande College. They were the first girls to be officially registered and receive college numbers, and provoked the first discussions about the possibility for a mixed-sex sixth form run in co-operation with the Ladies' College sixth form. Having been a boarding school since its re-chartering in 1824, the end of the 20th century saw a gradual decline in the number of children being sent to the island to board, not helped by the increasingly high fares on air and sea routes from the mainland. There was also a growing requirement for independent infant schooling in Guernsey, and so the King's Road boarding house was reopened in October 1996 as Acorn House pre-school and pre-prep. David Toze's appointment as principal in 1998 saw a large number of changes implemented at the school. He appointed the first-ever female headteacher of Beechwood in 2000, oversaw the merging of Acorn House and Beechwood into the Elizabeth College Junior School and drove forward the link between the Ladies' and Elizabeth College sixth forms.
Having appointed its first-ever female principal, Jenny Palmer, in 2017, in January 2020 the school announced that "in recognition of the needs of contemporary society", girls would be admitted to the upper school into year seven and into the sixth form from September 2021 as part of plans for the school to be entirely coeducational by 2025.
School structure.
The school operates a house system with four houses—Country, North, South and Town—referring loosely to the four parts of the island. Previously, pupils were assigned to a house based on where they and their families lived, but are now assigned arbitrarily. Year groups are divided into four roughly equal-sized tutor groups divided by house, each overseen by a dedicated tutor.
Teaching at the school is delivered over thirty-five periods per week, divided into 45-minute lessons in years seven and eleven and between 45 and 55 minutes in the sixth form, with a typical school day starting at 8:25 am and finishing at 4 pm. Lower down the school, students are divided into class groups by house, except for creative subjects which are taught in smaller mixed-ability groups. Further up the school, however, class groups combine students from all four houses and are determined by ability and/or subject choice.
Governance.
Governance is delivered by a board of between nine and twelve directors who serve for a six-year term, with the exception of the Dean of Guernsey, who acts as chairman. In addition to the Dean, two directors are appointed by the Lieutenant Governor and six are elected by the States of Guernsey. Several of the school's directors are former pupils of the school and parents of current pupils. These directors are required to meet both UK and Guernsey safeguarding standards. The school's permanent visitor is the Bishop of Winchester.
The school is located on the island of Guernsey, which forms the major part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a self-governing dependency of the British Crown which does not form part of the United Kingdom. The school is therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of the UK's Department for Education nor UK regulations regarding independent schools. Instead, it is accredited as a British school overseas under a voluntary accreditation scheme run by the Department for Education with standards which follow the framework and guidance for English independent schools.
One of the earliest members of the HMC (The Heads' Conference), it is a public school in the British sense of the term. It is one of the oldest schools in the British Isles and the oldest public school in the Channel Islands.
The school has charitable status in both the UK and Guernsey. In 2007 the school established The Elizabeth College Foundation (Guernsey registered charity CH91) and The Elizabeth College UK Foundation (a UK registered charity 1120954).
Admissions.
The school admits pupils between ages 11 and 18. It is selective, meaning prospective pupils must pass an entrance exam to be offered a place. Candidates for entry at age 11 sit an entrance assessment in November prior to entry in the following September which tests English, mathematics and verbal reasoning, while entry into the sixth form at 16 is based upon GCSE results. As of 2021, enrolment was 420 between years seven and eleven, and 147 in the sixth form, totalling 567.
The school accepts pupils with a wide ability range, though the results of standardised tests indicated that the average ability of pupils at the senior school was well above the national