Edith Sitwell
-
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.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | 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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
Timeline
1 January 1913
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
.