In all, Jenkins wrote a dozen novels and a dozen biographies. She was awarded an OBE in 1981.Supplement to The London Gazette of Friday, 12 June 1981, p. 11. Her 2004 memoir The View from Downshire Hill recounted her decades of living in a Regency architecture home she bought in Hampstead.Beauman, Nicola. "Elizabeth Jenkins obituary: Sensitive novelist and biographer of strong female characters", The Guardian, 7 September 2010. Retrieved 13 September 2010. She moved into the house in 1939 and decorated it with Regency style furniture that she had acquired inexpensively in the years following World War II from period houses that had been damaged during the war. She would later say that, based on her decor, "people assumed I was comfortably off, instead of being very hard up".
