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.
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...
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...
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...
Friends, Associates
Cecily Mackworth
Other friendships made now or later included many with distinguished women, like Ivy Compton-Burnett
(whom she found kinder to me than she apparently was to most other people),
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet.
112
and Stevie Smith
, whom...
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
Ada Leverson
Stevie Smith
in 1951 called Anne Yeo an astonishing portrait for the period.
Burkhart, Charles. Ada Leverson. Twayne.
107
Burkhart, Charles. Ada Leverson. Twayne.
153n3
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...
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
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...
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.
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...
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.
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...
