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.
At AEH
's death Virginia Woolf
wrote that although she had personal reservations about his muse—Always too laden with a peculiar scent for my taste. May, death, lads, Shropshire—
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
6: 33
he had...
Literary responses
Q. D. Leavis
Fiction and the Reading Public was widely reviewed. In the Criterion of July 1932, T. S. Eliot
commended its argument: A society which does not recognize the existence of art is barbaric. But a society...
Literary responses
Ezra Pound
Monroe
later added, I can't pretend to be much pleased at the course his verse is taking. A hint from Browning
at his most recondite, and erudition in seventeen languages.
Nadel, Ira Bruce, editor. “Chronology; Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
5
The same year Eliot
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
VW
wrote to Ethel Smyth
that the stories were diversions or treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 231
An Unwritten Novel, she said, showed her...
Literary responses
Ann Quin
Berg earned AQ
two major awards: the Harkness Fellowship, given to the most promising Commonwealth artist under thirty years, and the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship from the University of New Mexico
.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
This text was somewhat controversial: she noted, for instance, that T. S. Eliot
was shocked by her statement that [a]nimals we are and animals we remain, and the path to our regeneration, if there be...
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
As a manifesto for modernism, Jacob's Room divided the critics. T. S. Eliot
wrote in a letter that VW
had now succeeded in freeing her original gift from compromise with the traditional novel.
Lee's work had a highly mixed reception. It was praised by Pater: in a footnote added to the third edition of his Renaissance, he calls Euphoriona work abounding in knowledge and insights on...
Literary responses
May Sinclair
Reviews were almost all positive.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
255
Writing in the Dial in September 1922, T. S. Eliot
used this novel as the most notable example of the psychoanalytical type which, however, he disapproved in principle. Its...
Literary responses
Kathleen Raine
KR
longed vainly to be published by Eliot at Faber; by the time that she heard from Yeats
's daughter, years later, that he had first read her at the recommendation of Eliot
, she...
Literary responses
Susan Miles
This book appeared with very distinguished endorsement on its jacket. T. S. Eliot
wrote that he found it a very poignant story.Storm Jameson
wrote, Its simplicities are at a profound level. The theme is...
Literary responses
Radclyffe Hall
A number of writers rallied in support of RH
. E. M. Forster
and Leonard Woolf
drafted a letter protesting the suppression of The Well of Loneliness. Its signatories included Bernard Shaw
, T. S. Eliot
Literary responses
Edna St Vincent Millay
Edmund Wilson
disliked this work, apparently because the communist in it is just as ridiculous as the stockbroker, so that no authoritative, authorized, left-wing voice is supplied.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
406
But its success was stunning.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
405
Literary responses
Anne Ridler
When Anne Bradby (later AR
) plucked up courage to show some early poems to T. S. Eliot
(though not requesting publication by Faber and Faber
), she was encouraged by his advice: I should...
Literary responses
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
When most women writers of her age were forgotten, the Countess of Pembroke retained a niche in literary history as a partner in the Sidneian psalms as well as the dedicatee of the Arcadia....
