Jackson, Lydia (1899-1983)

The following is an interim description which may change when detailed cataloguing takes place in future:

Please note that this archive contains patient data that is highly sensitive in nature. When the archive is catalogued, the patient data will require closure for the lifetime of the data subjects in accordance with the 1998 Data Protection Act.

This description is based on a box list created whilst the material was stored at the Leeds Russian Archive. At this stage the contents of each box have not been verified against the box list.

Professional papers of Lydia Jackson including: published and unpublished papers; BSc and D.Phil thesis; lectures on child guidance; correspondence concerning Family Attitudes Test, delinquents, adoption, non-speaking children, school phobia, publication of papers and books, lectures, clinical cases, congresses, human rights; material relating to psychological congresses, study groups and associations; papers relating to the British Psychological Society; Family Attitudes test forms, pictures and other materials.

c.1946-1960

7 large boxes

The papers were transferred to the library at Wellcome Collection by the Centre for Family Research via the Lowenfeld Trust, 31/03/2005. They were formally presented to the library at Wellcome Collection by the Trustees of the Lowenfeld Archive with which these papers were held.

Lydia Jackson was born Lidiia Vitalevna Zhiburtovich in Russia, 1899. She studied Russian language and literature at Leningrad University. Leaving the Soviet Union in c.1926 she came to England, marrying a British citizen in 1929. She took up a career in child psychology in the 1930s, gaining her D.Phil. in Psychology from Oxford University in 1949. She lectured on psychology and practised child psychotherapy, notably the therapy of play. Jackson worked with Kathleen Todd, a pioneering New Zealand child psychiatrist (1898-1968), and they jointly published Child Treatment and the Therapy of Play in 1946. The book was aimed at professionals and parents and was a best seller. She also published Aggression and its Interpretation, (with a foreword by Felix Brown), in 1954, under her pen name of Elisaveta Fen.

Lydia Jackson also established herself as a novelist, autobiographer and translator. She published three autobiographical books: A Russian Childhood,1961; A Girl Grew Up In Russia, 1970; Remember Russia, 1973. As Fen, she also translated and prefaced editions of plays by Anton Pavlovich Chekov and translated works by other Russian authors including Zoshchenko, Bondaryev and Yevgheny Shvarts. Her novels include All Thy Waves 1977, Spring Floods 1979 and The Ebb 1981.

A photographic portrait of Elisaveta Fen is held by the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Personal and literary papers are held in the Leeds Russian Archive at University of Leeds. Refs: LRA/MS 1394 and addenda LRA/MS 1850.

This collection is currently uncatalogued and cannot be ordered online. Requests to view uncatalogued material are considered on a case by case basis. Please contact collections@wellcomecollection.org for more details.

The papers were originally given to the Leeds Russian Archive by the literary executor of the estate of Lydia Jackson during the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2000 the papers relating to Jackson's professional psychology and psychiatry work were, with the endorsement of the literary executor, transferred to the Centre for Family Research, Cambridge, and placed with the Margaret Lowenfeld archive. The Leeds Russian Archive, Leeds University Library Special Collections, continues to hold the personal and literary papers of Lydia Jackson.

In March 2005 the Centre for Family Research (which was due to close) transferred the Jackson papers (along with the papers of Margaret Lowenfeld), as a gift, to the Wellcome Library.