From 1958 to 1962, Jenner studied sinology at Oxford and wrote his dissertation about the history of Luoyang in the fifth and sixth centuries, especially through the work of Yang Xuanzhi.
His first wife was the China scholar Delia Davin.
[1] From 1963 to 1965, he worked as a translator at Foreign Languages Press in Beijing.
There he translated From Emperor to Citizen, an "autobiography" of the last Emperor of China, Puyi, and started translating the novel Journey to the West into English.
He has written about the process and politics of translating and publishing Journey to the West in an essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books (3 Feb 2016).