Elaine Feinstein is equally well regarded as a poet, a novelist, and translator of twentieth-century Russian women poets. She comes from a Russian-Jewish family (her grandparents emigrated from Odessa at the turn of the century), and a strong preoccupation with her background has, to a certain extent, kept her separate from the mainstream of English culture. She has been influenced as much by twentieth-century Russian poetry as by the English and American traditions. Her earlier work, concerned with the world of personal emotion and relationships and with the domestic environment, is remarkable for its economy, its stringent emotional honesty, and tough ironic humor, as well as an intensity and richness of metaphor unusual with this sort of subject matter. Her more recent work also projects the subjective and "domestic" into history and myth.

She was born in Bootle, Lancashire, to Isidore and Fay Compton Cooklin, and grew up...