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
Health Olivia Manning
In March 1948 Stevie Smith thought her depressed.
David, Deirdre. Olivia Manning: A Woman at War. Oxford University Press, 2012.
182
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Monica Furlong
She begins arrestingly: We live in a period in which it is not possible to talk meaningfully about God.
Furlong, Monica. The End of Our Exploring. Hodder and Stoughton, 1973.
13
She then posits an absolute human need for meaning and for myth (the core...
Intertextuality and Influence Anita Brookner
It is titled from the apparently Swiss resort hotel where the heroine, Edith Hope, is packed off by her friends after an embarrassing public faux pas. Trapped in an unsuspected love-affair with a married man...
Intertextuality and Influence Shena Mackay
This short novel, with a large cast centred on a district in South London, vibrates with the tension between satire and sympathy. The title is ironic: the protagonist, Lyris Crane, is a painter too...
Literary responses Olivia Manning
OM resented a review by Stevie Smith in the Sunday Times, which praised the many loving and studious things said here about cats, but then mixed its metaphors to devastating effect: Just a little...
Literary responses Ethel M. Dell
Stevie Smith , selecting EMD 's The Way of an Eagle as the eleventh in a list of Best Sellers of the Century for the Observer newspaper, praised it in very high terms.
qtd. in
Dell, Penelope. Nettie and Sissie. Hamish Hamilton, 1977.
167
Literary responses Olivia Manning
This book evoked a double-edged response from Ivy Compton-Burnett who, writing to Elizabeth Taylor , said: It really is full of very good descriptions. Quite excellent descriptions. I don't know if you care for descriptions...
Literary responses Patricia Beer
Reviewers continued on a note of faint praise. Anthony Thwaite , for instance, found in PB 's work an air of appraising experience in small mouthfuls, fastidious, ironical.
qtd. in
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research, 1985.
26
British Book News found her solid...
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 Rosamond Lehmann
RL 's Epilogue relates her own anxiety, on the day the book was first published, about its probable reception. She was flooded with relief, joy, gratitude, at finding both Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee
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...
Literary responses Ada Leverson
Stevie Smith in 1951 called Anne Yeo an astonishing portrait for the period.
qtd. in
Burkhart, Charles. Ada Leverson. Twayne, 1973.
107
Burkhart, Charles. Ada Leverson. Twayne, 1973.
153n3
Literary responses Ivy Compton-Burnett
Printed praise came from Stevie Smith and Raymond Mortimer among others. Elizabeth Taylor noticed how the reviewers' imagery harped on weapons: rapiers, axes, stilettos, knives and grenades.
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton, 1984.
213
Literary responses Ada Leverson
This novel was widely praised when it appeared. The Daily Mail reviewer, however, dismissed it as the typically inferior product of a lady writer, comparing it to its disadvantage with Dolores, first (and now...

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