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.
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
Travel Marie Belloc Lowndes
She also stayed at Mells near Frome in Somerset and at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire (with Osbert and Edith Sitwell ). From at least 1944 her elder daughter was at her husband's family home, Parfetts...
Travel Carson McCullers
The couple travelled to France together in 1946, and spent the winter and most of 1947 in Paris, with a side trip to Rome. CMC loved visiting new places both within and beyond...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Pamela Hansford Johnson
PHJ includes among her topics Edith Sitwell , Shakespeare , Ivy Compton-Burnett , and Proust : these are taken up not in formal critique, but in statements of what each meant to her. She writes...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Nina Hamnett
This book is highly readable: its fast-paced, witty narrative conducted in short sentences with few dates and even less of explanation or embroidery. NH is positively off-hand about such important topics as her early relations...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Nina Hamnett
This book opens in 1926, with the author considerably bewildered by [her] somewhat disordered life since [her] return to England,
Hamnett, Nina. Is She a Lady? A Problem in Autobiography. Allan Wingate.
38
and the later course of the book remains disordered, offering the same flow of...
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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Laura Riding
The volume was, says Elizabeth Friedmann , largely a response to the ideas of Wyndham Lewis .
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books.
114
LR sets out to free the poet from the restrictions imposed by the synthetic or collective notion...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ writes here of her own career and of her memories of encounters in the literary London of the twentieth century, with vivid and idiosyncratic pen-portraits of literary lions. She describes Edith Sitwell with enormous...
Textual Production E. B. C. Jones
Her contributors included Jane Barlow , Frank Betts , Elizabeth Bridges (later Daryush) , M. St Clare Byrne , Elsa L. Duff , A. P. Herbert , Aldous Huxley , E. H. W. Meyerstein ,...
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/.
Textual Production Vita Sackville-West
After attending Sitwell 's Façade at least twice (the first, private performance and another in 1926), VSW declared that in fifty years those frauds the Sitwells
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
164
would be forgotten. However, she published in the...
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 Judith Kazantzis
This remarkable anthology brings to a wider audience poems by many otherwise unknown writers, as well as by, for instance, Vera Brittain , Edith Sitwell , Nancy Cunard , Cicely Hamilton , Rose Macaulay ,...
Textual Production Bryher
Desmond MacCarthy had launched Life and Letters in June 1928; it issued its last number this month, and Bryher's new publication first appeared in September. It merged it with the London Mercury after May 1939...
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.