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
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...
Education Stella Gibbons
At the time SG attended the school, its headmistress was Dr Sophie Bryant , a suffragist, political campaigner for Irish Home Rule, and the first British woman to receive a doctorate in science. SG wrote...
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.
13
She then posits an absolute human need for meaning and for myth (the core...
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 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...
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 Elaine Feinstein
EF wrote her first poems at play, while she bounced tennis balls against the garage door. When she showed one to a teacher and it appeared in the school magazine, she became hooked for life...
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
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.
33-40, 215-18
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...
Textual Production Jeni Couzyn
JC edited for the 1970 Camden Festival a volume of twelve specially commissioned and previously unprinted poems, entitled Twelve to Twelve: Poetry D-Day, published through the Poets' Trust . This collection (whose cover gave...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jeni Couzyn
Her brief essay on Stevie Smith stresses originality, and also the omnipresence in Smith's poems of Death, as a presence not avoided but courted. Her even briefer piece on Sylvia Plath notes the tendency of...
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 .
Anthologization Wendy Cope
The Muse Strikes Back: A Poetic Response by Women to Men, edited by Katherine McAlpine and Gail White , included no less than six items from WC .
She is one of only five...
Family and Intimate relationships Ivy Compton-Burnett
But they lived as a couple. ICB distrusted marriage and advised her women friends not to marry if they could avoid it; she also believed that most relationships evolve into a domination of the weaker...

Timeline

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Texts

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