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.
The relevant clause in his will states: I leave all my manuscripts to Harriet Shaw Weaver and direct that she have sole decision in all literary matters relating to my writings published and unpublished.
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking.
Singh, G., and Q. D. Leavis. F.R. Leavis: A Literary Biography. Duckworth.
283-4
Occupation
Ezra Pound
In the spring of 1922, he and Barney began a short-lived project called Bel Esprit in an attempt to raise funds for struggling writers such as T. S. Eliot
(who ultimately refused their help).
QDL
spoke on A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights (later published as an essay), while her husband's topics included Eliot
and Yeats
.
Singh, G., and Q. D. Leavis. F.R. Leavis: A Literary Biography. Duckworth.
127
Occupation
Naomi Royde-Smith
By February 1923 NRS
was either literary editor on The Nation or still a candidate for the position: Virginia Woolf
was trying to unseat her, in order to pull wires and establish T. S. Eliot
Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. The Life of Una Marson, 1905-65. Manchester University Press.
157-8
Material Conditions of Writing
Virginia Woolf
VW
published in T. S. Eliot
's newly-renamed The New Criterion her essay On Being Ill, which she had written the previous autumn while she was indeed ill.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press.
3: 58n1, 46
Material Conditions of Writing
Anne Ridler
Ambiguity in English Verse Rhythms in this volume was the only result of a projected book on metrics which T. S. Eliot
had suggested, and which AR
had worked on during the second world war...
Material Conditions of Writing
Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS
began her literary career with reviewing, and continued to contribute to periodicals. At one time she was art critic for The Queen. During the Second World War she reviewed almost weekly for the...
Literary responses
Ann Quin
Berg earned AQ
two major awards: the Harkness Fellowship, given to the most promising Commonwealth artist under thirty years, and the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship from the University of New Mexico
.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
VW
wrote to Ethel Smyth
that the stories were diversions or treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 231
An Unwritten Novel, she said, showed her...
Literary responses
Vernon Lee
Lee's work had a highly mixed reception. It was praised by Pater: in a footnote added to the third edition of his Renaissance, he calls Euphoriona work abounding in knowledge and insights on...
Literary responses
Dora Russell
This text was somewhat controversial: she noted, for instance, that T. S. Eliot
was shocked by her statement that [a]nimals we are and animals we remain, and the path to our regeneration, if there be...
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
As a manifesto for modernism, Jacob's Room divided the critics. T. S. Eliot
wrote in a letter that VW
had now succeeded in freeing her original gift from compromise with the traditional novel.
