While researching 18th-century theater, Annibel Jenkins saw the future: reality TV. As she combed through 300-year-old newspapers and bits of information, she cobbled together bits and pieces of the not-so-personal lives of the actors, actresses and playwrights of the day.
“It was always there in the papers, and while she loved the history of the theater she also enjoyed the gossip,” said Martha F. Bowden, a friend and English professor at Kennesaw State University. “She saw something emerging then that would be familiar to what we know now.”
A lover of 18th-century literature and theater, Jenkins shared her affection for the time period with as many people as she could. She authored two books about playwrights from the period, and even helped establish associations for those who shared her predilection for the 1700s.
A former Georgia Tech English professor for 25 years, Jenkins was a founding member of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and an active member of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, both of which have literary prizes in her name.
“We will always treasure Annibel because, despite her advancing years, she was very keen on knowing what her junior colleagues were working on, and encouraging them to bring projects to fruition,” said Joe Johnson, president of the regional society and chairman of the department of humanities at Clayton State University. “She remained interested in young scholars and went out of her way to encourage them.”
Jenkins, of Atlanta, died March 20 from complications of an infection. She was 95.
Her body was buried at the Jenkins family plot in her hometown of Lucedale, Miss. A memorial service is planned for 2 p.m., April 21 at H.M. Patterson & Son, Oglethorpe Hill, which was in charge of arrangements.
Jenkins, who grew up minutes from the Mississippi/Alabama state line, earned her undergraduate degree from Blue Mountain College, in Blue Mountain, Miss. She then went to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she earned a master’s degree, and finally to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill for her doctorate. Before teaching at Tech, she taught at Blue Mountain and Mississippi College and the former Wake Forest College, now a university. Jenkins retired from Tech in the mid- to late-’80s, around her 70th birthday, said her nephew, Robert Peacock, of New York.
“She was really more of a mother to me, because she and my mother raised me from the time I was three months old,” he said. “But I can remember when I was young, we would sit around, and she would read me “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” and serve me coffee. We’d have coffee and these very adult conversations, and around three years old when we started doing that.”
In 1996, the coffee-drinking duo published a book together, “Paradise Garden: A trip through Howard Finster’s Visionary World.”
“I’ve been drinking coffee ever since,” Peacock said of his childhood. “My daughter turned four on Annibel’s 95th birthday. I haven’t started the “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” yet, but I do have the coffee pot brewing,” he added with a laugh.
Jenkins is also survived by her sister, Virginia Jenkins Peacock of Atlanta; and brother, George Jenkins of Mississippi.
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