LONDON — Before she found her voice as a feminist poet, Judith Kazantzis, who grew up in one of Britain’s most prominent literary families, began writing as an escape from the humdrum life of a housewife.

“Trapped” was one way she described it, in her early poem “Home.”

Another poem, “One a.m., November,” published in 1977, evoked a kind of domestic isolation:

the vibrant, experienced dishwasher

drums in the night

the cat bunches on the very edge of the ping-pong table

lulled

by the swish and wallow of saucepans

“I began to write to remedy the despair of a young housebound mother,” she wrote in an author statement submitted to the British Council, an organization that promotes culture abroad.

In a career that spanned nearly four decades, Ms. Kazantzis, who died on Sept. 18 at 78, published 12 collections of poetry, numerous essays and a novel, “Of Love and Terror,” published in 2002.

Her writing explored themes like the power relations between men and women and the abuses of power against the weak, and when it was first published in the 1970s, it resonated with an emerging new feminism — one that was giving a platform to women to express their repressed anger toward patriarchy, find a place in the literary establishment and, perhaps more important, connect with one another.