Elma Mitchell


Elma Mitchell was a Scottish-born poet and translator based in Somerset, who published several well-received books of poetry in the 1970s and 1980s.

Early life and education

Mitchell was born in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire. She attended Prior's Field School in Surrey, and won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she gained a first in English in 1941. She went on to achieve a diploma in librarianship at the School of Librarianship, University College London.

Career

Mitchell worked as a librarian and information officer for the BBC during World War II. She moved to Buckland St Mary, Somerset, and worked as a freelance writer and translator; she also did some amateur archaeological work in South Cadbury. Some of her poems were published in New Statesman in the 1960s. Her "quirkily original" poem "Thoughts After Ruskin" was first published in 1967; it won awards and was included in several anthologies. She published several books of poetry in the 1970s and 1980s.
Many of Mitchell's poems have feminist themes of domestic work, body image, creative frustration, and bereavement. "Mitchell frequently alludes to the strength tapped from the life force of routine necessities and occupations, especially women's traditional occupations," noted Marilyn Hacker in 1997. "This is a woman who is very conscious of being a body with all that implies of delight and restriction," commented poet Herbert Lomas in 1988.
Mitchell died in 2000, at the age of 81, in Buckland St Mary, Somerset. Her poems continue to be included in anthologies, decades after her death.

Awards