Stevie Smith

-
SS , publishing in the mid twentieth century, was a poet who is hard to categorise. All of her works—poetry, novels, stories, essays, reviews, a radio play, and her inimitable drawings— have a quirkiness, a pretence of naivete which masks an unyielding and uncomforting view of life. All of them, too, are based on her own life and the lives of her friends: the last characteristic brought a number of difficulties like resentment and threats of libel actions.
  • BirthName: Florence Margaret Smith
  • Nicknames: Peggy
    Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. Faber and Faber, 1988.
    3
    ; Stevie
    Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. Faber and Faber, 1988.
    3

  • Pseudonym: S.S.

Milestones

20 September 1902

SS was born as Florence Margaret Smith at Hull in Yorkshire.
Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. Faber and Faber, 1988.
3

14 December 1955

SS wrote to cancel her contract with André Deutsch Limited , who had accepted the book which became Not Waving but Drowning, but had refused the accompanying drawings.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage, 1983.
301

1957

SS published, with André Deutsch Limited , her poetry volume Not Waving but Drowning. This book not only brought her back into the public eye after a long hiatus, but made her famous.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage, 1983.
301
Cooke, Rachel, and Stevie Smith. “Introduction”. Novel on Yellow Paper, Virago, 2015.

16 January 1971

From hospital SS wrote to John Guest (her editor at her final publishers, Longman ) about the typescript of new poems including Come, Death.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage, 1983.
324-5

7 March 1971

SS died of a brain tumour in hospital in Ashburton, Devon, where she had been trying to help her sister.
Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. Faber and Faber, 1988.
299, 302
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage, 1983.
318

January 1972

SS 's last collection of new poems, Scorpion, was posthumously published.
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1874–1987.
1973
Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. Faber and Faber, 1988.
305

Biography

Birth and Background

20 September 1902

SS was born as Florence Margaret Smith at Hull in Yorkshire.
Spalding, Frances. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. Faber and Faber, 1988.
3