Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
T. S. Eliot
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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.
Harriet Shaw Weaver
had approached the Hogarth Press
about publishing Ulysses in April 1918, but the Woolfs declined, mainly because they could not have printed so massive a work themselves and because Leonard could find...
Friends, Associates
Hannah Arendt
HA
's journalistic and editorial work meant that she met almost everyone who belonged to the intellectual scene in New York, as well as those just passing through, like T. S. Eliot
. Those who...
Friends, Associates
Anne Ridler
Her brother was working for publishers George Bell
, and she met a number of authors, including Antonia White
and Margaret Kennedy
. Later, through her own work, she met with T. S. Eliot
's...
Friends, Associates
Harriet Shaw Weaver
Her friendship with Dora Marsden
remained constant until Marsden's mental health deteriorated. Marsden was one of the few people who knew and addressed HSW
by her pseudonym, Josephine Wright. After Weaver closed down the...
RP
knew T. S. Eliot
well enough to enjoy a courtly encounter with him at a bus stop, but she felt his great innovations had not necessarily been a good thing for English poetry, and...
Friends, Associates
Susan Hill
While studying at King's CollegeSH
, an aspiring writer, wrote to novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson
and her writer husband C. P. Snow
for advice on the profession. The couple answered her letters and even...
Friends, Associates
Marianne Moore
MM
corresponded with T. S. Eliot
from 1921 until the year before his death. She was a friend of H. D.
and of Bryher
, and her editors believe that every one of her five...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Bishop
In her junior year at college EB
interviewed T. S. Eliot
, who was in town to deliver the Norton Lectures. A year later she met Marianne Moore
.
Marshall, Megan. Elizabeth Bishop. A Miracle for Breakfast. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
34-6
Friends, Associates
Nancy Cunard
Her boredom with this life (her mother's social milieu) was something that she shared with her friend Iris Tree
, also a poet. Despite her antipathy towards it, this life presented her with important literary...
Friends, Associates
Aldous Huxley
Those friends of Aldous whom his wife Maria referred to as the brilliant ones,
and found intimidatingly intellectual, included T. S. Eliot
, Osbert
, Edith
, and Sacheverell Sitwell
, various members...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Bowen
EB
loved Oxford (where she and her husband spent ten years) and became a social success there. She met and became friends with John
and Susan Buchan
, and it was through them that she...
Friends, Associates
Evelyn Underhill
EU
and her husband led active social lives, often entertaining friends and colleagues at their home. Blanche Alethea Crackanthorpe
introduced her to Marie Belloc Lowndes
, who became a friend of Underhill and called her...
Friends, Associates
Edith Sitwell
ES
had many friendships, and there were few notables in the artistic world whom she did not meet. Her friendships were quite volatile, with frequent quarrels, sometimes caused by the practical jokes and the heightened...
