Stevie Smith

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Standard Name: Smith, Stevie
Birth Name: Florence Margaret Smith
Nickname: Peggy
Nickname: Stevie
Pseudonym: S. S.
SS , publishing in the mid twentieth century, was a poet who is hard to categorise. All of her works—poetry, novels, stories, essays, reviews, a radio play, and her inimitable drawings— have a quirkiness, a pretence of naivete which masks an unyielding and uncomforting view of life. All of them, too, are based on her own life and the lives of her friends: the last characteristic brought a number of difficulties like resentment and threats of libel actions.
Photograph of a circular blue English Heritage plaque in the brick wall of Smith's "house of female habitation" in Palmers Green. It reads: "Stevie Smith, 1902-1971, Poet lived here 1906-1971."
Black-and-white photo of Stevie Smith sitting in a park, 1954. Looking off-camera, she wears a white top, her arms are crossed in front of her, and she holds a li cigarette in her hand.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Seamus Heaney
He begins here with short pieces about his childhood reading and moves on through his development as a poet, paying tribute to Philip Hobsbaum as an influence. He puts forward the idea that his poetry...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Philip Larkin
The central subject is the period which saw the rise of modernism and its assimilation—or not—into the native English tradition,
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Faber and Faber.
502
a tradition represented here by poets from Housman , Hardy , and William Barnes
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jeni Couzyn
Her brief essay on Stevie Smith stresses originality, and also the omnipresence in Smith's poems of Death, as a presence not avoided but courted. Her even briefer piece on Sylvia Plath notes the tendency of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Fleur Adcock
Again her introduction is interesting and trenchant. She observes that the early twentieth century already feels remote. Her selection runs from Charlotte Mew (born in 1869) to a clutch of women a little over thirty:...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Patricia Beer
Some of PB 's technical experimenting is playful. In Memory of Stevie Smith sums up its tribute in an echo of its subject's rhythms: A heroine is someone who does what you cannot do /...
Textual Production Elizabeth Jennings
A later selection was issued by the same publisher under the same title, in 1970, edited by Stevie Smith . EJ followed this volume for Batsford by editing The Batsford Book of Religious Verse, 1981.
Textual Production Jeni Couzyn
Jeni Couzyn edited The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets, featuring poems and comments by eleven writers. Besides an autobiographical note for her own work, Couzyns supplied an essay on Stevie Smith .
Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons.
(1988)
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books.
33-40, 215-18
Textual Production Jeni Couzyn
JC edited for the 1970 Camden Festival a volume of twelve specially commissioned and previously unprinted poems, entitled Twelve to Twelve: Poetry D-Day, published through the Poets' Trust . This collection (whose cover gave...
Textual Production Elaine Feinstein
EF wrote her first poems at play, while she bounced tennis balls against the garage door. When she showed one to a teacher and it appeared in the school magazine, she became hooked for life...
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
MW has specialized in adapting and abridging novels for radio. Between 1980 and 2004 she adapted a wide array of fiction by women writers, including works by Jane Austen , Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot
Textual Production Vera Brittain
She had prepared herself for bad press on this account; however, she did not expect quite the level of fierce condemnation the book did receive. Among those who harshly criticized it were Lorna Lewis and...
Textual Features Olivia Manning
This novel's story reveals obvious autobiographical elements. Ellie Parsons, whose mother runs a down-at-heel seaside restaurant, escapes to London to work as a packer for a fashionable furniture designer. She moves into the decorative side...
Textual Features Anna Akhmatova
The lyrics are individually dated. One written on 19 August 1939 addresses Death (as Stevie Smith was to do a generation later) with a prayer to come quickly:
Feinstein, Elaine. Anna of all the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
171-2
I am waiting . ....
Textual Features Penelope Fitzgerald
The style of these Thirteen Poems suggests a lineage of Edward Lear , Stevie Smith , and Ogden Nash . The briefest, A Lover's Humble Request, runs (in full): Look at me / O...
Reception Frances Cornford
In this honour she followed Ruth Pitter (the first woman to be awarded the Queen's gold medal) and preceded Stevie Smith .

Timeline

1866: The Royal Society of Arts established a scheme...

National or international item

1866

The Royal Society of Arts established a scheme (believed to be the first in the world) for setting up commemorative plaques on buildings associated with famous people.
Quinn, Ben. “Plaque blues. Cuts hit heritage scheme”. Guardian Weekly, p. 16.

January 1930: International Women's News began publica...

Building item

January 1930

International Women's News began publication.

: The second number of Orion. A Miscellany...

Writing climate item

Autumn1945

The second number of Orion. A Miscellany appeared: Rosamond Lehmann was one of the editors, along with C. Day Lewis and Edwin Muir .

1965: Giles Gordon did a series of interviews for...

Women writers item

1965

Giles Gordon did a series of interviews for The Scotsman with female authors: a species of writer that at the time wasn't particularly recognised, although it certainly had been in the previous century.

May 1978: Virago Press issued its first Virago Modern...

Women writers item

May 1978

Virago Press issued its first Virago Modern Classics, a historically important series most though not all of which were novels.

10 September 2003: Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of...

Writing climate item

10 September 2003

Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of the Week a website entitled Poetry Landmarks of Britain: a map of poetic assocations plotted on an interactive map of Britain, searchable by region or category.

Texts

Smith, Stevie. A Good Time Was Had by All. Jonathan Cape, 1937.
Smith, Stevie, and Stevie Smith. “A Turn Outside”. Me Again, Virago, pp. 335-58.
Smith, Stevie. Harold’s Leap. Chapman and Hall, 1950.
Smith, Stevie. “Introduction”. Me Again, edited by Jack Barbera and William McBrien, Vintage, 1983, pp. 1-10.
Cooke, Rachel, and Stevie Smith. “Introduction”. Novel on Yellow Paper, Virago, 2015.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage, 1983.
Smith, Stevie. Mother, What Is Man?. Jonathan Cape, 1942.
Smith, Stevie. Not Waving but Drowning. André Deutsch, 1957.
Smith, Stevie. “Note to the 1985 edition”. Selected Poems, edited by James MacGibbon, Penguin, 1978.
Smith, Stevie. Novel on Yellow Paper. Jonathan Cape, 1936.
Smith, Stevie. Over the Frontier. Jonathan Cape, 1938.
Smith, Stevie. Scorpion. Longman, 1972.
Smith, Stevie. Selected Poems. Longman, 1962.
Smith, Stevie. Some Are More Human Than Others: Sketch-Book. Gaberbocchus, 1958.
Smith, Stevie. Tender Only to One. Jonathan Cape, 1938.
Smith, Stevie. The Best Beast. Knopf, 1969.
Smith, Stevie. The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith. Allen Lane, 1975.
Smith, Stevie. The Frog Prince. Longman, 1966.
Smith, Stevie. The Holiday. Chapman and Hall, 1949.