Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Stevie Smith
-
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.
Critic Sanford Sternlicht comments that her writing is like that of Stevie Smith
, a contemporary who also seemed to relate to animals better than she related to people.
Sternlicht, Sanford. Jean Rhys. Twayne.
131
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.
Dell, Penelope. Nettie and Sissie. Hamish Hamilton.
167
Literary responses
Ada Leverson
This novel was widely praised when it appeared. The Daily Mail reviewer, however, dismissed it as the typically inferior product of a lady writer, comparing it to its disadvantage with Dolores, first (and now...
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
British Book News began to cool wirh this novel: this time her central character is scarcely a sufficiently plausible figure to dominate the story as the plot requires.
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.
13
She then posits an absolute human need for meaning and for myth (the core...
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...
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...
Health
Olivia Manning
In March 1948 Stevie Smith
thought her depressed.
David, Deirdre. Olivia Manning: A Woman at War. Oxford University Press.
182
Friends, Associates
Rosita Forbes
She apparently had a friendly, teasing relationship while journeying with Ahmed Hassanein
, who went with her to Kufra but who was not, it seems, the creative mind behind the journey. Magazine publisher Sir Neville Pearson
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
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.
