My friend Jennifer Breen, who has died aged 83, spent much of her professional life contributing to the women’s movement by designing courses in women’s literature and putting together volumes celebrating neglected women’s poetry and prose.
The daughter of two teachers, Leo Breen and his wife, Molly (nee Zeven), Jennifer was born near Melbourne in Australia, where, after schooling at St Columba’s College in the city, she gained a degree in humanities from the University of Melbourne.
After a period as a social worker in Melbourne, supporting victims of domestic abuse, Jennifer moved to London in 1964. There she combined social work in Camden with studying for a postgraduate certificate in psychiatric social work at the Tavistock Institute.
She was then invited by the head of social work education at North London Polytechnic to design courses in literature, especially women’s literature, for trainee social workers, making such a success of the challenge that in 1979 she was asked to take on responsibility, under the department of language and literature, for a wider spectrum of courses on women’s literature.
She remained at North London Polytechnic, which achieved university status in 1992, until she retired in 2002, by which time she was overseeing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in women’s literature.
Jennifer’s work at North London Polytechnic led to the publication of volumes celebrating neglected women’s poetry and prose. Her own favourite among these was In Her Own Write (1989), which is both a forthright polemic and a unique guide to a wide range of worthwhile 20th-century female fiction, published by the late Jo Campling in her Women in Society – A Feminist List for Macmillan.
While working she also studied for a PhD at the University of London, writing her thesis on Wilfred Owen; that work led, in 1988, to the publication of her book Wilfred Owen: Selected Poetry and Prose. As well as many academic articles and reviews she also had published a series of four well-edited and carefully annotated anthologies in handsome affordable volumes, including Women Romantic Poets, 1785-1832 and Victorian Women’s Poetry 1830-1900. She also produced a comprehensive illustrated edition of The Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie, 1762-1851 , in which she demonstrated that Baillie’s lyric poems belong, as much as Burns’ and Wordsworth’s poetry, in the Romantic period canon.
Jennifer’s creativity found a different outlet in founding and editing the biannual BASA Magazine, which published original cartoon art, new poems by the likes of Peter Porter, and essays by critics such as Edward Neill and Randolph Quirk.
From 2016 she focused on a volume of her interlinked stories, set in a composite semi-rural district, drawn from her early life in Australia. The lead story, The Pity of It, appeared in the November 2017 issue of The London Magazine and the complete cycle will be published posthumously.
Jennifer is survived by her husband, the writer Bill (RW) Noble, a Canadian whom she met in London in 1970 and married in 1975, by their three daughters, Mary, Kathy and Roberta, four grandchildren, her brother, Kerry, and sister, Susan.
• This article was amended on 21 August 2020 to include more information about surviving relatives
