Jennifer Westwood

Jennifer Westwood (5 January 1940 – 12 May 2008) was a British author, broadcaster and folklorist. She was a Doctor of Philosophy with special interests in English Language, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. Her first book, Mediaeval Tales, was published in 1968. An active committee member of The Folklore Society from 1987 until 2003, she undertook a variety of duties including editing its publications and helping other authors. As a broadcaster, she worked on programmes produced for BBC Radio 4 and the corporation's Radio Norfolk. Commonly known as "Jen", after her second marriage she also authored books in the name of Jennifer Chandler.

Born Jennifer Beatrice Fulcher in Norton Subcourse, a small village in Norfolk, on 5 January 1940, her father was employed as a bricklayer and her mother was a school teacher. Her primary school education was at Beccles in Suffolk, some eight miles distant from her home, although she had been taught to read by the time she was three-years-old. She then attended Sir John Leman Grammar School, again in Beccles, where she went on to secure a place at St Anne's College, Oxford to further her education, studying English and Anglo-Saxon Languages.

Following her marriage to Trevor Westwood who was undertaking a course at Loughborough University in Sports Education, she attended Cambridge University studying Old Norse. She travelled to Iceland and Scandinavia to carry out research for her degree. In 1968 she was divorced from her first husband. Her second marriage was to a management consultant, Brian Chandler. She had a son, Jonathan.

In 1968 her first book, Mediaeval Tales, was published; based on the stories she had researched while at Cambridge, the book was produced for the enjoyment of children. A compendium of adapted British medieval stories together with tales from the same era translated from French, Dr Jessie Roderick, the University of Maryland's assistant Professor of Education, felt it would give children in Upper Elementary Schools a good foundation in the topic. Westwood went on to pen several more books in the same genre as well as contributing to Rupert Bear Annuals. Writing in The Observer literary critic Naomi Lewis describes Westwood's next book, Gilgamesh and Other Babylonian Tales, also published in 1968, as providing an "informing scholarly commentary".

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