Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Stevie Smith
-
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.
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...
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.
Dell, Penelope. Nettie and Sissie. Hamish Hamilton.
167
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...
Friends, Associates
Penelope Fitzgerald
PF
was a friend of L. P. Hartley
and of Stevie Smith
, both of whom she met when they contributed to World Review, of which she and her husband were editors. Her sudden...
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...
Friends, Associates
Rosita Forbes
She apparently had a friendly, teasing relationship while journeying with Ahmed Hassanein
, who went with her to Kufra but who was not, it seems, the creative mind behind the journey. Magazine publisher Sir Neville Pearson
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.
13
She then posits an absolute human need for meaning and for myth (the core...
Education
Stella Gibbons
At the time SG
attended the school, its headmistress was Dr Sophie Bryant
, a suffragist, political campaigner for Irish Home Rule, and the first British woman to receive a doctorate in science. SG
wrote...
Friends, Associates
Rumer Godden
RG
preserved her friendship with the director Jean Renoir
from the time that he filmed her novel The River. After moving to Highgate she became friendly with the writer Stevie Smith
(whom she calls...
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...
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.
politics
Pamela Hansford Johnson
During the 1970s PHJ
declared herself in sympathy with many of the aims of the Women's Liberation Movement. Equal pay for equal work, equality of opportunity, in so far as it is possible.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner.
57
She...
Occupation
Philip Larkin
From the 1960s PL
became a committee-man and public intellectual. He rendered service in various ways to his profession of librarianship. For the Arts Council of Great Britain
he served on the literature panel, and...
