In The Here And Now

Janet Montefiore, Professor Emerita of the University of Kent, is a critic and poet born in Cambridge in 1948.  She read English Language and Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and from 1972 to 2015 was a university teacher of English Literature, first at Liverpool University and from 1978 at the University of Kent, where she taught English and American Literature, Women’s Studies (pioneered by Kent as a postgraduate degree), and latterly creative writing. Her books include Feminism and Poetry (1987, 2004), Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (1996), Rudyard Kipling (2007) and most recently the essay collection Kipling in India: India in Kipling, co-edited with Harish Trivedi (2020). 

After her first short collection In a Glass (1979), she published poems in numerous periodicals, and more recently two collections published by Shoestring Press.

Responses to her autobiographical sequence Shaping Spirits 1948–66 (Shoestring Press 2016) and Disposing of the Clothes (Shoestring Press 2019):

‘Janet Montefiore’s sonnets “shape” childhood and adolescent memories, limning a place, a time, a kind of life now disappearing, as vividly as any novelist.’ – Marilyn Hacker

‘In such a tiny pamphlet as Disposing of the Clothes, it is a wonder to find such a major voice as Janet Montefiore’s. In terms of subject matter these are not easy poems, [but] so finely crafted that their music sings out over and above the sadnesses and traumas so poignantly outlined.’ – Patricia Macarthy