Edith Sitwell

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Standard Name: Sitwell, Edith
Birth Name: Edith Louisa Sitwell
ES was an important member of the modernist movement in England. She was primarily a poet and secondarily a literary critic, though her personal polemics, biographies, anthologies, letters, and autobiography all reflect her unique personality and power as a literary stylist.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders photograph of Edith Sitwell by Cecil Beaton, 1962. She wears her black ostrich-feather turban with taffeta standing up on top, a black long-sleeved blouse, and over it an elaborately folded white arrangement like wings. She rests her head between her hands, which are adorned with large, heavy rings.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Iris Tree
Edith Sitwell included thirty-one poems by IT in the first four cycles of her serial modernist verse anthology, Wheels.
Sitwell, Edith, editor. Wheels. B. H. Blackwell.
prelims
Anthologization Nancy Cunard
Seven Poems by NC appeared in Wheels, edited by Edith Sitwell , the first in a series of six anthologies of new and experimental poetry by that title.
Chisholm, Anne. Nancy Cunard. Knopf, 1979.
36
Education Rumer Godden
RG 's determination to become a writer fuelled a continued self-education. Books were hard to come by in India, yet she managed to find and devour recent publications: Edith Sitwell 's Troy Park and Façade...
Education Jeni Couzyn
JC describes her younger self as a solitary child, rebellious and defiant, challenging everything and everyone.
Couzyn, Jeni, editor. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe Books, 1985.
217
Some poets became important to her in her youth through the influence of her sisters: Dylan Thomas ...
Education Doreen Wallace
At Somerville DW became a close friend of Dorothy Sayers (their religious and political disagreements later drove them apart) and in her circle met Vera Brittain , Winifred Holtby , and theSitwells .
Leonardi, Susan J. Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists. Rutgers University Press, 1989.
57
Education Anne Ridler
She lived in a King's College hostel in Queensborough Terrace near Hyde Park,London. The course included lectures on history and literature. The distinguished scholar Jack Isaacs lectured on Shakespeare , Donne , and Milton
Family and Intimate relationships Jeni Couzyn
Jeni's sisters offered early poetic encouragement, and provided a connection between literature, as learned in school, and poems written privately. When she was about fifteen, JC remembers one of her sisters giving her two LP...
Family and Intimate relationships Viola Tree
VT 's two sisters were Felicity, later Lady Cory-Wright , and the much younger poet, playwright, and actress Iris Tree . Iris, who looked up to, admired, and adored Viola, published three volumes of poetry...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Jenkins
Having met Edith Sitwell when she was an undergraduate (an acquaintance which she later kept up) EJ was asked by Pernel Strachey when she left Newnham whether she would like an invitation to Leonard and...
Friends, Associates Sybille Bedford
Introduced to Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria by the South African poet Roy Campbell while at Sanary, the young SB became their intimate friend.
Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint, 2005.
249-50
She was later embarrassed by her earlier admiration for...
Friends, Associates Dylan Thomas
DT 's huge roster of friends in London included the American writer Emily Holmes Coleman and his most significant early patron, Edith Sitwell . Before Sitwell reviewed his early poems he had mocked her in...
Friends, Associates Carson McCullers
CMC made a strong and enduring friendship in her forties with Mary Mercer , a therapist who treated her for depression. Other friends made in her late years were Edward Albee and John Huston ...
Friends, Associates Pamela Hansford Johnson
Friends made in New York included PHJ 's publisher Charles Scribner , as well as Diana and Lionel Trillingwhom I loved, but always found a little intimidating.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner, 1974.
45
At home her literary friends included...
Friends, Associates Naomi Royde-Smith
NRS was a close friend of Rose Macaulay , with whom in the immediate postwar period she shared entertaining duties at her flat, in something similar to a salon. They apparently met through Macaulay contributing...
Friends, Associates Amabel Williams-Ellis
AWE 's friends and associates included Edith Sitwell , whose poems she often published in The Spectator; Storm Jameson , a political mentor
Williams-Ellis, Amabel. All Stracheys Are Cousins. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.
128
as well as a creative advisor; Bertrand and Dora Russell

Timeline

1 January 1913
Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury.
January 1933
The first number appeared of the periodicalNew Verse, edited by Geoffrey Grigson ; it ran until May 1939.
Early 1936
The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts (who was put forward for this task by T. S. Eliot ), set out to define the modern movement, not just chronologically but according...
8 December 1936
The BBC for the first time televised a full-length ballet: William Walton 's Façade (derived from Edith Sitwell ) with Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann .
December 1965
Actress Peggy Ashcroft toured Norway with a show of her own devising, Words on Women and Some Women's Words, originally written for performance at London University .