Edith Sitwell

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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.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders photograph of Edith Sitwell by Cecil Beaton, 1962. She wears her black ostrich-feather turban with taffeta standing up on top, a black long-sleeved blouse, and over it an elaborately folded white arrangement like wings. She rests her head between her hands, which are adorned with large, heavy rings.

Connections

Connections 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, dec. 1916.
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 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...
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
Some poets became important to her in her youth through the influence of her sisters: Dylan Thomas ...
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 Violet Trefusis
Around the same period she began friendships with, among others, Edith , Osbert , and Sacheverell Sitwell , Rebecca West , and Nancy Cunard . She writes in her memoir of the scintilliating Sitwell triumverate...
Friends, Associates Nancy Cunard
Her boredom with this life (her mother's social milieu) was something that she shared with her friend Iris Tree , also a poet. Despite her antipathy towards it, this life presented her with important literary...
Friends, Associates Storm Jameson
Jameson met Romer Wilson , Charles Morgan , and J. W. N. Sullivan through her Knopf connections. By about 1924 she and Edith Sitwell had visited each other's homes. Jameson felt that in spite of...
Friends, Associates Rose Macaulay
In 1921 RM was spending several nights a week in a room she rented in the large house of writer Naomi Royde-Smith at 44 Prince's Gardens, Kensington.
Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. John Murray, 1991.
191
Babington Smith, Constance. Rose Macaulay. Collins, 1972.
100
Chosen by Royde-Smith as a...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Jenkins
Pernel Strachey was then Principal of Newnham. EJ , as secretary of the college literary society, was privileged to invite Edith Sitwell to address the society, and to meet and entertain the great poet.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson, 2004.
21
Friends, Associates Carson McCullers
Other friends who not of this group but who were important to CMC included several distinguished writers: Eudora Welty , Katherine Anne Porter , Tennessee Williams , Elizabeth Ames (director of the writers' community at...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Jenkins
Having met Edith Sitwell when she was an undergraduate (an acquaintance which she later kept up) EJ was asked by Pernel Strachey when she left Newnham whether she would like an invitation to Leonard and...

Timeline

1 January 1913
Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury.
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 .

Texts

Sitwell, Edith. A Poet’s Notebook. Macmillan, 1943.
Sitwell, Edith. Alexander Pope. Faber and Faber, 1930.
Sitwell, Edith. Aspects of Modern Poetry. Duckworth, 1934.
Sitwell, Edith. Bath. Faber and Faber, 1932.
Sitwell, Edith. Bucolic Comedies. Duckworth.
Sitwell, Edith. Clowns’ Houses. Blackwell.
Sitwell, Edith. Collected Poems. Macmillan, 1957.
Sitwell, Edith. Elegy on Dead Fashion. Duckworth.
Sitwell, Edith. English Women. William Collins, 1942.
Sitwell, Edith. Façade. Favil.
Sitwell, Edith. Fanfare for Elizabeth. Macmillan, 1946.
Sitwell, Edith. Gardeners and Astronomers. Macmillan, 1953.
Sitwell, Edith. Gold Coast Customs. Duckworth, 1929.
Sitwell, Edith. Green Song and Other Poems. Macmillan, 1944.
Sitwell, Edith. I Live under a Black Sun. Gollancz, 1937.
Sitwell, Edith, and Bryher. “Introduction”. The Fourteenth of October, Collins, 1954, pp. 3-5.
Greene, Richard, and Edith Sitwell. “Introduction”. Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell, Virago Books, 1997, p. v - viii.
Sitwell, Edith. Planet and Glow-Worm, a Book for the Sleepless. Macmillan, 1944.
Sitwell, Edith. Rustic Elegies. Duckworth.
Sitwell, Edith. Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell. Editor Greene, Richard, Virago Books, 1997.
Sitwell, Edith. Selected Poems. Penguin, 1952.
Sitwell, Edith. Street Songs. Macmillan, 1942.
Sitwell, Edith. Taken Care Of: An Autobiography. Hutchinson, 1965.
Sitwell, Edith. The American Genius. J. Lehmann, 1951.
Sitwell, Edith, editor. The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry. Little, Brown, 1958.