Literary afterlives are never ­certain, but few have been more unpredictable than that of Elizabeth Jennings.

Her 1979 Selected Poems sold out in two weeks and went on to sell 50,000 copies – almost unheard of for poetry – and over the course of her career she won multiple literary prizes and sold about a quarter of a million copies of her books. On her death in 2001, a newspaper obituary called her “one of the best-loved British poets of the past 50 years”. And yet this year, her centenary, there is little by way of celebration, and the legacy of Elizabeth Jennings seems more muted than ever.

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