Ruth Fainlight’s life in verse

Sitting at the kitchen table, Ruth Fainlight looks out of the window to the street below. “The most startling thing to me is that, after all this time, I’m still here,” says the 93-year-old poet.

Fainlight has lived in her flat on the second floor of a mansion block in west London for nearly 55 years, ever since she and her late husband, the writer Alan Sillitoe, moved here in 1970. The afternoon light falls across the wooden table, piles of newspapers and copies of The New Yorker, a line of tins of herbs and spices with faded handwritten labels, and ’60s kitchen utensils hanging in a row. Everything glows with the patina of time and care. The ochre walls of the corridors are covered in floor-to-ceiling bookcases packed with soft cloth spines; framed artworks, signed by friends, hang on every wall. In the sitting room is a bronze bust of Sillitoe, topped with his straw hat from Mexico. The couple met in a bookshop in Nottingham in 1950, when she was 19 and he 22. For 60 years they lived and worked together in France, Mallorca, Morocco, driving across America and Europe on the long car journeys they both loved. In London they walked every day in the park at the end of the road. When Sillitoe became ill, he sat on a bench while Fainlight walked. The invisible shape of their life together fills the flat. “He’s vividly present to me in a way I never expected,” she says. “I’m really amazed by how intense the connection is. I mean, it’s getting on for 15 years since his death.”

Is that why she hasn’t moved? “I’m probably afraid to.”

Fainlight began writing poetry as a child – composing rhymes in her head before starting to write them down from the age of “seven or eight”. She was first published at the age of 13 and she has become one of the most critically acclaimed and prolific poets of our time. But all her life she has had to fight to be seen outside two contexts: being a “woman” poet (in the 1960s, if there was an anthology of 20 poets and one was a woman “you were grateful”, she says); and being married to a successful writer. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning made her husband an overnight success in 1958. Being stereotyped was an irritation rather than an impediment to work. “I’ve written poetry all my life,” she says. “It’s just a job.”

Fainlight is small and neat in a pale-yellow shirt, grey wool cardigan, needlecord trousers. She has arthritis that causes pain in her left arm – her writing hand – although she doesn’t refer to it, and what she terms “a hereditary heart-failure situation” that means that for the past 13 months she has been able to leave the flat only sporadically. She has a high forehead, a finely curved nose, very dark, intense eyes, and she speaks and listens with great care and concentration, bringing all the weight of her intelligence on the words she chooses and the sentences formed. If there were one word to sum up this extraordinary writer, it would be precision. 

“I can work on a poem for years,” she says, “literally years. Or I can write it simply and amazingly rapidly. That’s intriguing, I think.”

After struggling for her work to be known independently of her marriage, she finds even now the poems people want from her seem to be those that interrogate the process of loss. She was recently commissioned to write two poems – one on grief, one on lust. “I found it very easy to write the erotic one. I’m having more trouble with the grief.” Her face lifts.

Ruth Fainlight was born in 1931 to a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in the Bronx, New York. Her parents were immigrants from England and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; she had one younger brother, Harry. In 1936, when she was five, her father moved the family back to London – “absolutely batty”, she says – and was called up; the family was evacuated to Wales before sailing back to America in 1940 to live with her mother’s sister in Arlington, Virginia. When the war ended, they returned to England. Fainlight and her brother were sent to grammar schools where it quickly became clear that she was naturally academic. At 15, she was a voracious reader; loved TS Eliot, Emily Brontë and Milton. “I was terribly competitive,” she says, “but only with myself.”

Her headmistress tried to persuade Fainlight’s father that she should go to university but he refused. Her brother was allowed to stay on. Secretarial college was suggested as an alternative: “I didn’t accept it.” Her father eventually agreed that she could go to art college if she took a dress-making course. She quietly transferred herself to fine arts.

She met Sillitoe in Nottingham, where she was living with her first husband. He too was an aspiring writer, who had left the RAF after suffering from tuberculosis. It was a meeting of minds. Fainlight ended her marriage, and the couple moved to rural France to live and work, both writing short stories and poems. She was still only 20. Sillitoe had a tiny pension for them to survive on and they found a house to rent for £48 a year. They married in 1959. 

From France, they moved to Mallorca – because it was even cheaper – where they became friends with Robert Graves. “We would walk miles over to Deià because we couldn’t afford a taxi.” Graves offered Fainlight a sort of poetic apprenticeship. He would take her into his study and talk her through corrections he’d made on a poem, and she would sometimes show him her work. “I was in awe of him as a poet, and I would have to be really confident that a poem was good enough to show him. But it was my teaching – an invaluable experience.”

When Sillitoe’s pension ran out, they returned to England with just £10 to their name, finding a flat in Camden Town – “a complete slum then”. In 1961, they met Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath at an awards ceremony in London. The two couples immediately became friends. There were many similarities between Fainlight and Plath. “We recognised each other,” she says. Fainlight saw in Plath a reflection of her own conflicted position of “writer’s wife”: “She was a burningly ambitious and intelligent young woman, trying to look like a conventional devoted wife but not quite succeeding.” When they visited their new friends in Devon with their baby son, Fainlight helped Plath to pick daffodils and noted her industrious attitude to homemaking. “She really was in thrall to being a good wife and mother in the Good Housekeeping sense. I had a bit of that.” She refers to it almost like an illness. “I was conscious of suffering from it.”

Fainlight was “a very, very good writer’s wife, unfortunately”, she says. Before Sillitoe had sold his book, she took a job in market research to earn some money while he stayed at home to write. The success of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning meant they could both afford to live as writers. But Fainlight found her husband’s sudden success difficult to adjust to. “It was hard because I felt it took me a long time to get going. But the success of that book was a means to an end.” She also had the household to run, the cooking and – following the birth of their son, David, in 1962 – the childcare. Alan would help, she says, but he was able to write all day, while Fainlight would often work at night, when the housekeeping was done and there were no more demands on her. Nevertheless, she believes that she did “more and better work” after having her son.  

Fainlight’s first collection, Cages, was published in 1966. In the following 50 years she has published 20 more, with her work regularly appearing in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books and the TLS. “I might take a poem through 20 or 30 drafts,” she says. “I might work on it for months, and still, at the end, realise that it isn’t quite what it should be, and put it by to go back to it later.” It’s just part of the work, what she describes as both “vocation and compulsion”. 

It’s also indisputably an act of feminism. “There’s this image of the poet – the ‘Romantic poet’ – and it seems to me that it’s much more of a problem for men than it is for  women,” she continues. “The problem of really trying to write poetry, rather than waiting for the moment of inspiration. Women are less susceptible to it because they’re more humble. They’ve been cut down to size.”

Fainlight was more than familiar with being “cut down to size”. She turned one encounter with the poet Robert Lowell into a poem, “Dinner-Table Conversation”. In the dialogue that unfolds – her struggle to argue for her place, his malice-tinged dismissal – only her interrogation of that divide enables her to circumvent what is expected of her and instead seek out “the place where / Hazard reigns and poetry begins”. It’s an example of what Alice Quinn, poetry editor at The New Yorker from 1987 to 2007, defines as Fainlight’s deft evocation of “the blow at the heart of a poem”. Quinn published much of Fainlight’s work during that period. She writes of the thrill of holding them in her hand as they arrived by mail – “these elegiac, exquisitely beautiful, lyrical poems”.

Ruth Padel, poet and author, argues that Fainlight’s feminism is only one of the many strands of her work. “Above all, she’s naked,” she says. “She says it as it is. Unlike Plath, who goes from her gut, Fainlight goes through her eye. And there’s the sharpness of that visual.”

New & Collected Poems by Ruth Fainlight, 2010 (Bloodaxe Books, £20)

Somewhere Else Entirely by Ruth Fainlight, 2018 (Bloodaxe Books, £9.95)

The couple moved to Morocco in 1962. Fainlight was keen to get away from societal expectations of her role, and comparisons with other mothers. There they became friends with Paul and Jane Bowles. A heterosexual marriage was out of the ordinary among the artistic set: everyone else was gay. “There was no comparison.” Meanwhile, she and Plath continued to write to each other as the latter’s marriage broke down, and by January 1963 Fainlight was preparing to return to England to stay with her friend in Devon. But then Sillitoe brought home a copy of The Observer with an announcement of the poet’s death. She could barely take it in. Back in London, she met Assia Wevill, the woman with whom Ted Hughes had had an affair. “At first I hated her,” she says. “Then I got to know her, and I came to love her.” 

Fainlight’s life has been a struggle against being pigeonholed into various identities: “good” daughter; writer’s wife; mother. But what does this award-winning poet, short-story writer, translator and librettist view as her identity now? She was always conscious that when her family had returned to Europe in 1936, it was only by chance they returned to London and not another country in Europe – “if my father had been French or Belgian or even German. We were lucky to survive.” As an evacuee at school in Wales, “the girls wouldn’t believe that I was Jewish. They pushed me down in the playground and felt my head to see if I had horns, because Jews must have horns. It’s something I’ve never forgotten.”

“Her life and her writing are completely intertwined,” says Emily Andersen, photographer and filmmaker who has made an hour-long essay-film about Fainlight’s life and work. “She knew I understood how difficult it had been for her to make it as a poet. She managed it through sheer will and determination, as well as talent.”

The light is fading in the kitchen, orange streaks falling across the sky above the tall rows of houses and the empty roads. Just visible are the green tops of the trees in the park where Fainlight once walked every day. Now she jokes that she has “the right temperament for house arrest. I mean, I’m able to endure it.”

Her grit is innate. In her poem “Elegant Sibyl” she describes a female oracle who climbs into a “deep stone bath” of water “so cold / that even at the height of summer she shudders, and in winter / the effort of will the action demands / has become her greatest indulgence”. We talk about the links between creativity and the unconscious, and how the unconscious can sometimes seem like a fathomless black lake. “I can see that dark lake so clearly,” she says. “I associate writing poetry – most definitely – with getting into the water, that flick of the feet, and then you swim up to the surface.”  

Ruth Fainlight’s most recent collection of poems, Somewhere Else Entirely, is published by Bloodaxe Books. The film of the same name will be released later this year.

Helen Bain’s novel about Sylvia Plath’s life in Devon will be published by Bloomsbury and Scribner in 2026