Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
T. S. Eliot
-
Standard Name: Eliot, T. S.
Used Form: Thomas Stearns Eliot
TSE
, an American settled in England, was the dominant voice in English poetry during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as an immensely influential critic. His early experimental poems excel at catching an atmosphere or mood, often a moment of stasis and self-doubt. The Waste Land, a brilliant collage of fragments, has been seen to express the fears of a whole society about the threatened end of culture and amenity called civilization. After Eliot's conversion to Christianity his poetry moved to sombre investigations of the spiritual life: of time, fate, decision, guilt, and reconciliation. Meanwhile his criticism grappled with the the relation of past to present in terms of the contemporary relationship to tradition. TSE
also wrote lively comic verse, and in theatrical writing he moved on from pageant and historical religious drama to symbolic representation of spiritual issues through events in banal daily life.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Textual Production
Djuna Barnes
Nightwood was published in New York in March 1937 by Harcourt Brace
, with an introduction by Eliot
praising its great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization...
Textual Production
Storm Jameson
Jameson had been approached by the Ministry of Information
once the USA had entered World War II, for suggestions on how to cement Anglo-American relations.
Jameson, Storm. Journey from the North. Harper and Row.
The publication was part of the prize offered by the Sunday Referee for the author of the best poem it had published that year. The previous year's winner had been Pamela Hansford Johnson
, currently...
Textual Production
Anne Ridler
AR
's fourth book of poetry was called The Golden Bird, and Other Poems, and included a sonnet written for T. S. Eliot
on his sixtieth birthday.
Backscheider, Paula R., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 27. Gale Research.
27: 300
Textual Production
Mary Butts
Her efforts to find a publisher for this novel did not meet with success until September 1927.
Wormald, Mark. “Not to be forgotten”. Times Literary Supplement, pp. 10-12.
10
In a journal entry that year she lamented how the novel might well have been called The...
Textual Production
Doris Lessing
DL
published, in London and New York, her first novel, The Grass is Singing.
The idyllic sound of the novel's title is belied by its context in T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land...
Textual Production
Vita Sackville-West
VSW
followed her Behn biography two years later with Andrew Marvell, to open Faber and Faber
's series The Poets on the Poets (in which the second volume was provided by Eliot
writing on Dante
).
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
222
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jennings
EJ
titled another poetry volume, Consequently I Rejoice, with words from T. S. Eliot
's Ash Wednesday, quoting the context of the phrase as an epigraph.
British Book News. British Council.
(1977): May insert
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production
Kathleen Raine
Early in her career KR
was known as a commentator on contemporary or near-contemporary, modernist poetry: a volume of her reviews written between January 1941 and March 1951 was published in 2002 as Defining the...
Textual Production
Ada Leverson
AL
wrote to T. S. Eliot
(editor of The Criterion) offering him an essay on Wilde
, something on Proust
, and a short story, The Consultation.
Wyndham, Violet. The Sphinx and Her Circle: A Biographical Sketch of Ada Leverson 1862-1933. A. Deutsch.
93
Textual Production
Hope Mirrlees
HM
published A Fly in Amber: Being an Extravagant Biography of the Romantic Antiquary Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. It was published through Faber and Faber
, who obtained it through HM
's old friend T. S. Eliot
.
Henig, Suzanne. “Queen of Lud: Hope Mirrlees”. Virginia Woolf Quarterly, Vol.
1
, No. 1, pp. 8-27.
8
Textual Production
Flannery O'Connor
As the thesis for her Master of Fine Arts degree, FOC
submitted a collection of six pieces: The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories, dedicated to Paul Engle
. Its title is one of...
Textual Production
Edith Sitwell
These volumes were milestones in the development of English modernism, posing a serious challenge to the poetic orthodoxies of the day, through verbal music, incongruous imagery, and a touch of surrealism, rather than the understatement...
