Jennifer Breen, the social worker and feminist academic who edited "volumes celebrating neglected women's poetry and prose," died at the age of 83, the Guardian reported.
Born in Melbourne, Australia, Breen earned a degree in humanities from the University of Melbourne and was a social worker before moving to London in 1964. She continued her social work there while working toward a postgraduate degree in psychiatric social work at the Tavistock Institute.
In the 1970s, she began design courses in women's literature for trainee social workers at North London Polytechnic. She did such a good job that by 1979, she was overseeing an entire spectrum of courses on women's literature for the department of language and literature. At the time of her retirement in 2002, she was in charge of both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in women's literature.
Throughout her time at North London Polytechnic she published several collections of neglected poetry and prose writing by women. According to the Guardian, her personal favorite of these was In Her Own Write, a selection of 20th-century fiction written by women.
While doing all this she earned a Ph.D. in literature at the University of London, and her thesis on Wilfred Owen eventually led to her publishing a collection of Owen's poetry and prose. She also was the force behind annotated anthologies of women Romantic poets and Victorian women's poetry, among others.
In 2016, Breen focused on writing fiction of her own, a series of interlinked short stories based on her early life in Australia. The lead story in that collection, "The Pity of It," was published in London magazine in 2017; a complete collection of those stories will be published at a later date.