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.
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.
213
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...
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...
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...
Publishing
Jeni Couzyn
In the late 1960s a male friend of JC
passed on to her a commission for an anthology of love poems by women. The publisher had delicate lyrics in mind, and was horrified at Couzyn's...
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...
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...
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
Frances Cornford
In this honour she followed Ruth Pitter
(the first woman to be awarded the Queen's gold medal) and preceded Stevie Smith
.
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...
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 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...