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
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
Literary responses Elizabeth Taylor
Reviews of A Game of Hide and Seek included high praise from Marghanita Laski and Elizabeth Bowen (some consolation to ET for her problems with her US publisher), but also carping which she found deeply...
Literary responses Muriel Spark
British Book News began to cool wirh this novel: this time her central character is scarcely a sufficiently plausible figure to dominate the story as the plot requires.
British Book News. British Council.
(1960): 289
But Storm Jameson found the...
Reception E. J. Scovell
This volume was a Poetry Book Society recommendation.
Dowson, Jane, editor. Women’s Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology. Routledge.
122
Janet Montefiore regrets the absence of EJS from Robin Skelton 's anthology New Verse, 1964, while acknowledging that it would be unfair to blame Skelton...
Reception Sappho
Among the earliest of Sappho 's translators into English was Anne Finch ; among recent translators is Mary Barnard , 1958. Stevie Smith declined to take her on. Finch chose to render not a love-poem...
Literary responses Jean Rhys
Critic Sanford Sternlicht comments that her writing is like that of Stevie Smith , a contemporary who also seemed to relate to animals better than she related to people.
Sternlicht, Sanford. Jean Rhys. Twayne.
131
Literary responses Amber Reeves
Ernest Jones , reviewing this book in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, made no objection to her distinction between superego and moral code. The book was also reviewed by Stevie Smith .
Reeves, Amber. Ethics for Unbelievers. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
vi
“Stevie Smith Papers. Series II: Book Reviews”. McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa: Department of Special Collections and University Archives.
Cultural formation Barbara Pym
As for marriage, BP 's involvements with men as a student must have been to some extent influenced by social pressure to marry. She felt badly let down when Henry Harvey decided to wed another...
Reception Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Intertextuality and Influence Edna O'Brien
EOB has named many women writers as important to her: she includes among these Jane Austen , Emily Dickinson , Elizabeth Bowen , Anna Akhmatova , Anita Brookner , and Margaret Atwood , adding: Every...
Friends, Associates Naomi Mitchison
NM 's adult friends included artists and writers such as Gertrude Hermes , Storm Jameson , Goldie Lowes Dickinson , Julian Trevelyan , Gerald Heard , and Rudi Messel . Among the close friends were...
Friends, Associates Betty Miller
BM 's friends included Olivia Manning , Rosamond Lehmann , Stevie Smith , Inez Holden , Viola Meynell , and Eleanor Farjeon .
Miller, Sarah, and Betty Miller. “Introduction”. On the Side of the Angels, Virago, p. vii - xviii.
xv
In wartime she met and immediately took to Adrian Stephen ,...
Friends, Associates Olivia Manning
OM 's early friends included Celia Jordan . She met Stevie Smith in 1937, after each had a novel come out from the same publisher within months of each other. A close friendship developed which...
Family and Intimate relationships Olivia Manning
They met and married within a few weeks. Reggie Smith, who was home on leave from a job in Bucharest, was a socialist, a charmer, a philanderer, and a feminist (who was later to edit...
Health Olivia Manning
In March 1948 Stevie Smith thought her depressed.
David, Deirdre. Olivia Manning: A Woman at War. Oxford University Press.
182

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.