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 Features Iris Tree
The poems reflect key preoccupations of their time and of IT 's literary circle. They are shaped by admiration for the traditions and themes of later nineteenth-century French poetry, the Symbolists, and such English poets...
Occupation Viola Tree
VT gave a concert at the Aeolian Hall in London. She sang French songs, including some by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel .
The Æolian Hall was the venue for Edith Sitwell 's notorious...
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 Dylan Thomas
DT 's huge roster of friends in London included the American writer Emily Holmes Coleman and his most significant early patron, Edith Sitwell . Before Sitwell reviewed his early poems he had mocked her in...
Literary responses Dylan Thomas
Thomas's first slim volume virtually made his reputation, which its successor consolidated.
Phillips, Adam. “A Terrible Thing, Thank God”. London Review of Books, pp. 22-4.
22
Well-known and respected reviewers were impressed, responding especially to the poems' palpable originality. The eminent Edith Sitwell became an instant admirer, and...
Literary responses Dylan Thomas
Reviewers were not quite so generally enthusiastic as over his first collection. Edith Sitwell , however, this time published a review in the Sunday Times, and her praise prompted an energetic correspondence which helped...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Taylor
Several shorter stories are gems. Two of them explore respectively the experiences of birth and of death, from the viewpoint of those on the fringes of the central event. Many stories are hard on women...
Friends, Associates Gertrude Stein
It was John Lane and Roger Fry who introduced them to the Bloomsbury circle. The trip did not result in a publishing contract, as GS had hoped, but it did advance her reputation. The next...
Occupation Gertrude Stein
Persuaded by Edith Sitwell and Harold Acton , GS agreed to a small lecture tour. She lectured about grammar and literature. She was apparently inspired to explicate her ideas on composition, rhythm, repetition and identity...
Textual Production Gertrude Stein
GS began her period of portraiture around 1908. Her portraits resembled biographical sketches but they were usually more impressionistic than factual.She thought that this genre allowed her to capture the immediacy of characters and to...
Literary responses Gertrude Stein
Edith Sitwell reviewed Geography and Plays in 1923, and expressed reservations about its insuperable amount of silliness.
Brinnin, John Malcolm, and John Ashbery. The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and her World. Addison-Wesley.
280
A year later, in another review, however, she said that she had read almost nothing else.A representative...
Textual Production Gertrude Stein
Edith Sitwell had hosted a tea for GS when she came to lecture at Cambridge and Oxford earlier that year; in attendance were Leonard and Virginia Woolf .
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family. Rutgers University Press.
184
They had written on 11 June...
Friends, Associates Muriel Spark
MS became extremely close to her landlady, Tiny Lazzari , who despite her name was Irish, and who not only lodged her but delighted in feeding her and acting as a gatekeeper to keep out...
Textual Production Dora Sigerson
DS 's last publication, eight years after her death, was Ernest Benn 's printing of twenty-one of her poems as a pamphlet in its Augustan Books of Poetry series.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Other poets in this series included...
Occupation Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
She served as the club's organizer and hostess. She intended it as a space where fledgling writers could gather and make contact with established authors. Her friend J. D. Beresford , novelist, was the club's...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Sitwell, Edith. The Canticle of the Rose / Selected Poems, 1920-1947. Macmillan, 1949.
Sitwell, Edith. The Collected Poems of Edith Sitwell. Duckworth, 1930.
Sitwell, Edith. The English Eccentrics. Faber and Faber, 1933.
Bryher, and Edith Sitwell. The Fourteenth of October. Pantheon, 1952.
Sitwell, Edith. The Mother: and Other Poems. Blackwell, 1915.
Sitwell, Edith. The Outcasts. Macmillan, 1962.
Sitwell, Edith. The Pleasures of Poetry; A Critical Anthology. Duckworth, 1932.
Sitwell, Edith. The Queens and the Hive. Macmillan, 1962.
Sitwell, Edith. The Shadow of Cain. J. Lehmann, 1947.
Sitwell, Edith. The Sleeping Beauty. Duckworth.
Sitwell, Edith. The Song of the Cold. Macmillan, 1945.
Sitwell, Edith. The Wooden Pegasus. Blackwell.
Sitwell, Edith. Troy Park. Duckworth.
Sitwell, Edith, and Osbert Sitwell. Twentieth Century Harlequinade, and Other Poems. Blackwell, 1916.
Sitwell, Edith. Victoria of England. Faber and Faber, 1936.
Sitwell, Edith, editor. Wheels. B. H. Blackwell.
Sitwell, Edith et al., editors. Wheels. B. H. Blackwell, 1921.
Sitwell, Edith, editor. Wheels, 1917, a Second Cycle. B. H. Blackwell, 1917.
Sitwell, Edith, editor. Wheels, 1918, Third Cycle. B. H. Blackwell, 1918.
Sitwell, Edith, editor. Wheels, 1919, Fourth Cycle. B. H. Blackwell, 1919.