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.
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.
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research.
26
British Book News found her solid...
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...
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...
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.
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
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...
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...
Dowson, Jane, editor. Women’s Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology. Routledge.
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...
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.
171-2
I am waiting . ....
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 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
Jeni Couzyn
Jeni Couzyn
edited The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets, featuring poems and comments by eleven writers. Besides an autobiographical note for her own work, Couzyns supplied an essay on Stevie Smith
.
Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons.
(1988)
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books.