She wrote, "An inner certainty of being loved and valued went a long way to create my own sense of resilience in later years spent in a world that felt altogether alien.

At the end of the war Feinstein's sense of childhood security was shattered by the revelations of the Nazi extermination camps.

"[4] A recent critic commented: "Alive to her family origins in the Russian-Jewish diaspora, she developed a close affinity with the Russian poets of this and the last century.

"[9] Several novels concern her Jewish roots: The Survivors (1982), spans the generations before and after the Holocaust, while The Border (1984) tells of an old woman in Sydney and her "painful, mysterious... escape from Vienna with her husband in 1939".

In 1959, she wrote to Charles Olson to request permission to publish his work in her magazine Prospect, becoming the first of a group of poets associated with The English Intelligencer to make contact with him.

[10] Olson's reply, on "breath prosody" and the development of his poetics since the publication of his essay "Projective Verse", has since been widely anthologised.

[12] Feinstein travelled extensively, to read her work at festivals abroad, and as Writer in Residence for the British Council, first in Singapore, and then in Tromsø, Norway.

[3] Feinstein participated in the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in November 2010 and continued to give readings in various countries.