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
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...
Occupation Philip Larkin
From the 1960s PL became a committee-man and public intellectual. He rendered service in various ways to his profession of librarianship. For the Arts Council of Great Britain he served on the literature panel, and...
Occupation Frances Horovitz
Patrick Magee , Harvey Hall , Stevie Smith , Hugh Dickson , and Basil Jones were the other readers for the project. The poets from whose work they read included W. B. Yeats , D. H. Lawrence
politics Pamela Hansford Johnson
During the 1970s PHJ declared herself in sympathy with many of the aims of the Women's Liberation Movement. Equal pay for equal work, equality of opportunity, in so far as it is possible.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner, 1974.
57
She...
Publishing Jeni Couzyn
In the late 1960s a male friend of JC passed on to her a commission for an anthology of love poems by women. The publisher had delicate lyrics in mind, and was horrified at Couzyn's...
Reception E. J. Scovell
This volume was a Poetry Book Society recommendation.
Dowson, Jane, editor. Women’s Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology. Routledge, 1996.
122
Janet Montefiore regrets the absence of EJS from Robin Skelton 's anthology New Verse, 1964, while acknowledging that it would be unfair to blame Skelton...
Reception Sappho
Among the earliest of Sappho 's translators into English was Anne Finch ; among recent translators is Mary Barnard , 1958. Stevie Smith declined to take her on. Finch chose to render not a love-poem...
Reception Frances Cornford
In this honour she followed Ruth Pitter (the first woman to be awarded the Queen's gold medal) and preceded Stevie Smith .
Reception Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Textual Features Penelope Fitzgerald
The style of these Thirteen Poems suggests a lineage of Edward Lear , Stevie Smith , and Ogden Nash . The briefest, A Lover's Humble Request, runs (in full): Look at me / O...
Textual Features Olivia Manning
This novel's story reveals obvious autobiographical elements. Ellie Parsons, whose mother runs a down-at-heel seaside restaurant, escapes to London to work as a packer for a fashionable furniture designer. She moves into the decorative side...
Textual Features Anna Akhmatova
The lyrics are individually dated. One written on 19 August 1939 addresses Death (as Stevie Smith was to do a generation later) with a prayer to come quickly:
Feinstein, Elaine. Anna of all the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005.
171-2
I am waiting . ....
Textual Production Elizabeth Jennings
A later selection was issued by the same publisher under the same title, in 1970, edited by Stevie Smith . EJ followed this volume for Batsford by editing The Batsford Book of Religious Verse, 1981.
Textual Production Vera Brittain
She had prepared herself for bad press on this account; however, she did not expect quite the level of fierce condemnation the book did receive. Among those who harshly criticized it were Lorna Lewis and...

Timeline

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Texts

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