Edith Sitwell
-
Standard Name: Sitwell, Edith
Birth Name: Edith Louisa Sitwell
ES
was an important member of the modernist movement in England. She was primarily a poet and secondarily a literary critic, though her personal polemics, biographies, anthologies, letters, and autobiography all reflect her unique personality and power as a literary stylist.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
Anthologization | Iris Tree | Edith Sitwell
included thirty-one poems by IT
in the first four cycles of her serial modernist verse anthology, Wheels. Sitwell, Edith, editor. Wheels. B. H. Blackwell. prelims |
Anthologization | Nancy Cunard | Seven Poems by NC
appeared in Wheels, edited by Edith Sitwell
, the first in a series of six anthologies of new and experimental poetry by that title. Chisholm, Anne. Nancy Cunard. Knopf, 1979. 36 |
Education | Jeni Couzyn | JC
describes her younger self as a solitary child, rebellious and defiant, challenging everything and everyone. Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books, 1985. 217 |
Education | Doreen Wallace | At Somerville DW
became a close friend of Dorothy Sayers
(their religious and political disagreements later drove them apart) and in her circle met Vera Brittain
, Winifred Holtby
, and theSitwells
. Leonardi, Susan J. Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists. Rutgers University Press, 1989. 57 |
Education | Anne Ridler | She lived in a King's College hostel in Queensborough Terrace near Hyde Park,London. The course included lectures on history and literature. The distinguished scholar Jack Isaacs
lectured on Shakespeare
, Donne
, and Milton |
Education | Rumer Godden | RG
's determination to become a writer fuelled a continued self-education. Books were hard to come by in India, yet she managed to find and devour recent publications: Edith Sitwell
's Troy Park and Façade... |
Family and Intimate relationships | Jeni Couzyn | Jeni's sisters offered early poetic encouragement, and provided a connection between literature, as learned in school, and poems written privately. When she was about fifteen, JC
remembers one of her sisters giving her two LP... |
Family and Intimate relationships | Viola Tree | VT
's two sisters were Felicity, later Lady Cory-Wright
, and the much younger poet, playwright, and actress Iris Tree
. Iris, who looked up to, admired, and adored Viola, published three volumes of poetry... |
Friends, Associates | Virginia Woolf | By the time of the move to Tavistock Square, VW
began to socialize more than she had in years. She circulated with Bloomsbury familiars and (re)acquainted herself with Rebecca West
, Rose Macaulay
,... |
Friends, Associates | Nina Hamnett | She took up old friendships, making visits out of wartime London to Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska
in Gloucestershire and Roger Fry
at Guildford (where Lady Strachey
led the party in evening literary games). She breakfasted regularly with... |
Friends, Associates | Susan Miles | During her years at Bloomsbury, UR met the many distinguished literary figures who were either parishioners or readers at fund-raising events, like T. S. Eliot
, John Middleton Murry
, Edith Sitwell
, Wilfrid Meynell |
Friends, Associates | Bryher | The flat became a gathering place for friends including the Sitwells (Bryher grew especially close to Edith
and Osbert
), Elizabeth Bowen
, and Ivy Compton-Burnett
. Schaffner, Perdita. “Keeper of the Flame”. H.D., Woman and Poet, edited by Michael King, National Poetry Foundation, 1986, pp. 27 -33. 32 Bryher,. The Days of Mars. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. 18 |
Friends, Associates | Marianne Moore | MM
corresponded with T. S. Eliot
from 1921 until the year before his death. She was a friend of H. D.
and of Bryher
, and her editors believe that every one of her five... |
Friends, Associates | Ada Leverson | During the 1920s she came to count the Sitwells among her close friends. She once sent a laurel crown to Edith Sitwell
, and she attended the first performance of Façade at the Aeolian Hall |
Friends, Associates | Ann Quin | In Connecticut she attended a party to celebrate the recent publication of Marguerite Young
's novel Miss MacIntosh, my darling. Commenting on this nearly two-thousand-page tome, AQ
noted if Edith Sitwell
had written a... |
Timeline
1 January 1913
January 1933
The first number appeared of the periodicalNew Verse, edited by Geoffrey Grigson
; it ran until May 1939.
Early 1936
The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts
(who was put forward for this task by T. S. Eliot
), set out to define the modern movement, not just chronologically but according...
8 December 1936
The BBC
for the first time televised a full-length ballet: William Walton
's Façade (derived from Edith Sitwell
) with Margot Fonteyn
and Robert Helpmann
.
December 1965
Actress Peggy Ashcroft
toured Norway with a show of her own devising, Words on Women and Some Women's Words, originally written for performance at London University
.