Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
T. S. Eliot
-
Standard Name: Eliot, T. S.
Used Form: Thomas Stearns Eliot
TSE
, an American settled in England, was the dominant voice in English poetry during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as an immensely influential critic. His early experimental poems excel at catching an atmosphere or mood, often a moment of stasis and self-doubt. The Waste Land, a brilliant collage of fragments, has been seen to express the fears of a whole society about the threatened end of culture and amenity called civilization. After Eliot's conversion to Christianity his poetry moved to sombre investigations of the spiritual life: of time, fate, decision, guilt, and reconciliation. Meanwhile his criticism grappled with the the relation of past to present in terms of the contemporary relationship to tradition. TSE
also wrote lively comic verse, and in theatrical writing he moved on from pageant and historical religious drama to symbolic representation of spiritual issues through events in banal daily life.
RL
included a few family photographs, and headed two of the four sections with quotations from T. S. Eliot
's Four Quartets. Her working title for her book had been Eliot's Go, Said the...
Textual Production
Doris Lessing
DL
published, in London and New York, her first novel, The Grass is Singing.
The idyllic sound of the novel's title is belied by its context in T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land...
Textual Production
Ada Leverson
AL
wrote to T. S. Eliot
(editor of The Criterion) offering him an essay on Wilde
, something on Proust
, and a short story, The Consultation.
Wyndham, Violet. The Sphinx and Her Circle: A Biographical Sketch of Ada Leverson 1862-1933. A. Deutsch.
93
Family and Intimate relationships
Ada Leverson
AL
's three sisters all married socially prominent Jewish husbands.
Speedie, Julie. Wonderful Sphinx: The Biography of Ada Leverson. Virago.
239-40
Textual Production
Denise Levertov
From the age of about seven DL
had a sense of vocation, thinking of herself as an artist-person and as having a destiny. She aspired after fame from the time that she first read...
Publishing
Rose Macaulay
One of RM
's last articles, The First Impact of The Waste Land, appeared in T. S. Eliot
: A Symposium for His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Neville Braybrooke
.
Crawford, Alice. Paradise Pursued: The Novels of Rose Macaulay. Associated University Presses.
193
Textual Production
Rose Macaulay
The title opens an epigraph of three lines of poetry attributed to Anon but actually written by RM
herself. T. S. Eliot
's The Waste Land supplied another epigraph.
Lefanu, Sarah. Rose Macaulay. Virago.
248
Friends, Associates
Cecily Mackworth
Her literary circle in Paris was highly eclectic: the many camps in which she had friends included the Surrealist rump, the incoming Existentialists, and the Communists (who were mostly ex-Surrealists).
T. S. Eliot
, an early and appreciative reader of this book, invited the author to meet him over tea at his Faber and Faber
office in Russell Square. Mackworth, however, felt intimidated by...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ethel Mannin
Ragged Banners also addresses questions of genre. The text includes an index which lists on the one hand names of notable literary figures (including Ethel M. Dell
, T. S. Eliot
, and Shakespeare
...
By 1930, Kingsley Martin
, editor of New Statesman and Nation, noted that Time and Tide was one of the leading British weeklies. It was read by the leaders of the country, including Prime...
Textual Features
Dora Marsden
Marsden was neither unaware nor entirely appreciative of Pound's intellectual programme or his professional ethics. She told Weaver
in a letter of November 1913 (after the journal had again been relaunched with a new name)...
Textual Production
Dora Marsden
Assistant editors were Richard Aldington
and Leonard Compton-Rickett
, and later H. D.
(when Aldington went to war in June 1916) and T. S. Eliot
(from July 1917). Contributors of creative work and critical reviews...
