Stevie Smith

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Standard Name: Smith, Stevie
Birth Name: Florence Margaret Smith
Nickname: Peggy
Nickname: Stevie
Pseudonym: S. S.
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.
Photograph of a circular blue English Heritage plaque in the brick wall of Smith's "house of female habitation" in Palmers Green. It reads: "Stevie Smith, 1902-1971, Poet lived here 1906-1971."
Black-and-white photo of Stevie Smith sitting in a park, 1954. Looking off-camera, she wears a white top, her arms are crossed in front of her, and she holds a li cigarette in her hand.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Ethel M. Dell
Stevie Smith , selecting EMD 's The Way of an Eagle as the eleventh in a list of Best Sellers of the Century for the Observer newspaper, praised it in very high terms.
qtd. in
Dell, Penelope. Nettie and Sissie. Hamish Hamilton, 1977.
167
Literary responses Olivia Manning
OM resented a review by Stevie Smith in the Sunday Times, which praised the many loving and studious things said here about cats, but then mixed its metaphors to devastating effect: Just a little...
Literary responses Olivia Manning
This book evoked a double-edged response from Ivy Compton-Burnett who, writing to Elizabeth Taylor , said: It really is full of very good descriptions. Quite excellent descriptions. I don't know if you care for descriptions...
Literary responses Patricia Beer
Reviewers continued on a note of faint praise. Anthony Thwaite , for instance, found in PB 's work an air of appraising experience in small mouthfuls, fastidious, ironical.
qtd. in
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research, 1985.
26
British Book News found her solid...
Intertextuality and Influence Shena Mackay
This short novel, with a large cast centred on a district in South London, vibrates with the tension between satire and sympathy. The title is ironic: the protagonist, Lyris Crane, is a painter too...
Intertextuality and Influence Monica Furlong
She begins arrestingly: We live in a period in which it is not possible to talk meaningfully about God.
Furlong, Monica. The End of Our Exploring. Hodder and Stoughton, 1973.
13
She then posits an absolute human need for meaning and for myth (the core...
Intertextuality and Influence Edna O'Brien
EOB has named many women writers as important to her: she includes among these Jane Austen , Emily Dickinson , Elizabeth Bowen , Anna Akhmatova , Anita Brookner , and Margaret Atwood , adding: Every...
Intertextuality and Influence Anita Brookner
It is titled from the apparently Swiss resort hotel where the heroine, Edith Hope, is packed off by her friends after an embarrassing public faux pas. Trapped in an unsuspected love-affair with a married man...
Health Olivia Manning
In March 1948 Stevie Smith thought her depressed.
David, Deirdre. Olivia Manning: A Woman at War. Oxford University Press, 2012.
182
Friends, Associates Ivy Compton-Burnett
Her relationship with a close woman friend, Stevie Smith , became the subject of a book by a younger friend, Kay Dick , in 1971.
Friends, Associates Cecily Mackworth
Other friendships made now or later included many with distinguished women, like Ivy Compton-Burnett (whom she found kinder to me than she apparently was to most other people),
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987.
112
and Stevie Smith , whom...
Friends, Associates Olivia Manning
OM 's early friends included Celia Jordan . She met Stevie Smith in 1937, after each had a novel come out from the same publisher within months of each other. A close friendship developed which...
Friends, Associates Rumer Godden
RG preserved her friendship with the director Jean Renoir from the time that he filmed her novel The River. After moving to Highgate she became friendly with the writer Stevie Smith (whom she calls...
Friends, Associates Patricia Beer
PB met her fellow-poet Stevie Smith late in Smith's life, and developed a friendship which, though not close,
qtd. in
Mullan, John. “Obituary: Patricia Beer”. The Guardian, 19 Aug. 1999, p. 18.
18
she much valued.
Friends, Associates Penelope Fitzgerald
PF was a friend of L. P. Hartley and of Stevie Smith , both of whom she met when they contributed to World Review, of which she and her husband were editors. Her sudden...

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