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
Textual Production W. B. Yeats
WBY published The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935. His idiosyncratic selection included Alice Meynell , Ezra Pound , Edith Sitwell , Rabindranath Tagore , Sylvia Townsend Warner , and his friend Dorothy Wellesley .
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
280n27
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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 ,...
Leisure and Society Amabel Williams-Ellis
AWE made her formal entry into society as a debutante, a change of status . . . important then for the young females of our sub-tribe.
Williams-Ellis, Amabel. All Stracheys Are Cousins. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
34
For herself and Edith Sitwell (debs at...
Friends, Associates Amabel Williams-Ellis
AWE 's friends and associates included Edith Sitwell , whose poems she often published in The Spectator; Storm Jameson , a political mentor
Williams-Ellis, Amabel. All Stracheys Are Cousins. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
128
as well as a creative advisor; Bertrand and Dora Russell
Literary responses Dorothy Wellesley
Yeats admired this volume for its explorations of the picturesque, for its love . . . for undisturbed Nature, a hatred for the abstract, the mechanical, the invented, and for an intensity which he saw...
Reception Dorothy Wellesley
W. B. Yeats , then aged seventy, discovered DW 's writing in 1935 when he was ill in bed and was at work on The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. He was feeling disillusioned...
Textual Features Dorothy Wellesley
The contents are arranged in thirteen sections, from Romance and Poems on Love to Life and Death, War, and Night and Sleep. They come from twenty-seven poets, of whom only five are...
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.
57
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Alison Uttley
Her diaries offer an apparently uncensored version of what she toned down in her autobiographical works: an internal world of great passion, where self-confidence and uncertainty, pride and self-pity, joy and anguish are intermingled.
Judd, Denis. Alison Uttley. Michael Joseph.
xii
Friends, Associates Violet Trefusis
VT strengthened her bonds with Osbert , Edith , and Sacheverell Sitwell , and formed others with Peggy Guggenheim , Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), François Mitterand , and Cecil Beaton .
Jullian, Philippe et al. Violet Trefusis: Life and Letters. Hamish Hamilton.
124-5, 135
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...
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
Author summary Iris Tree
Twentieth-century poet IT published three volumes of poetry in her twenties and thirties and a long poem in her old age. Her poems also appeared in verse anthologies, most notably Edith Sitwell 's Wheels...
Textual Production Iris Tree
Not long afterwards, IT was discovered again, this time by classical scholar Edward Marsh .
Marsh was editor of Rupert Brooke 's poems and of the anthology Georgian Poetry, whose five volumes appeared between...
Textual Production Iris Tree
Sitwell included five poems by Tree in the first cycle, eight in the second, and nine in each of the third and fourth cycles. The anthology, which extended to six cycles in all, also included...

Timeline

1 January 1913: Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at...

Writing climate item

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 periodical...

Writing climate item

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...

Writing climate item

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...

Building item

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...

Women writers item

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.