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
Friends, Associates Storm Jameson
Jameson met Romer Wilson, Charles Morgan, and J. W. N. Sullivan through her Knopf connections. By about 1924 she and Edith Sitwell had visited each other's homes. Jameson felt that in spite of...
Friends, Associates Rose Macaulay
In 1921 RM was spending several nights a week in a room she rented in the large house of writer Naomi Royde-Smith at 44 Prince's Gardens, Kensington.
Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. John Murray, 1991.
191
Babington Smith, Constance. Rose Macaulay. Collins, 1972.
100
Chosen by Royde-Smith as a...
Friends, Associates Carson McCullers
Other friends who not of this group but who were important to CMC included several distinguished writers: Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Ames (director of the writers' community at...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Jenkins
Pernel Strachey was then Principal of Newnham. EJ, as secretary of the college literary society, was privileged to invite Edith Sitwell to address the society, and to meet and entertain the great poet.
Jenkins, Elizabeth. The View from Downshire Hill. Michael Johnson, 2004.
21
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 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 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 Virginia Woolf
By the time of the move to Tavistock Square, VW began to socialize more than she had in years. She circulated with Bloomsbury familiars and (re)acquainted herself with Rebecca West, Rose Macaulay,...
Friends, Associates Pamela Hansford Johnson
Friends made in New York included PHJ's publisher Charles Scribner, as well as Diana and Lionel Trilling whom 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 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 Charlotte Mew
CM refused an invitation to visit Edith Sitwell after they met at the Bookshop in 1919.
Warner, Val. “New Light on Charlotte Mew”. PN Review, Vol.
24
, No. 1, 1997, pp. 43-7.
46
Fitzgerald, Penelope. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends. Collins, 1984, p. 240 pp.
191
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 Nina Hamnett
She took up old friendships, making visits out of wartime London to Sophie Gaudier-Brzeska in Gloucestershire and Roger Fry at Guildford (where Lady Strachey led the party in evening literary games). She breakfasted regularly with...
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
Friends, Associates Susan Miles
During her years at Bloomsbury, UR met the many distinguished literary figures who were either parishioners or readers at fund-raising events, like T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, Edith Sitwell, Wilfrid Meynell

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Sitwell, Edith. The Canticle of the Rose / Selected Poems, 1920-1947. Macmillan, 1949.
Sitwell, Edith. The Collected Poems of Edith Sitwell. Duckworth, 1930.
Sitwell, Edith. The English Eccentrics. Faber and Faber, 1933.
Bryher, and Edith Sitwell. The Fourteenth of October. Pantheon, 1952.
Sitwell, Edith. The Mother: and Other Poems. Blackwell, 1915.
Sitwell, Edith. The Outcasts. Macmillan, 1962.
Sitwell, Edith. The Pleasures of Poetry; A Critical Anthology. Duckworth, 1932, 3 vols.
Sitwell, Edith. The Queens and the Hive. Macmillan, 1962.
Sitwell, Edith. The Shadow of Cain. J. Lehmann, 1947.
Sitwell, Edith. The Sleeping Beauty. Duckworth.
Sitwell, Edith. The Song of the Cold. Macmillan, 1945.
Sitwell, Edith. The Wooden Pegasus. Blackwell.
Sitwell, Edith. Troy Park. Duckworth.
Sitwell, Edith, and Osbert Sitwell. Twentieth Century Harlequinade, and Other Poems. Blackwell, 1916.
Sitwell, Edith. Victoria of England. Faber and Faber, 1936.
Sitwell, Edith, editor. Wheels. B. H. Blackwell.
Sitwell, Edith et al., editors. Wheels. B. H. Blackwell, 1921.
Sitwell, Edith, editor. Wheels, 1917, a Second Cycle. B. H. Blackwell, 1917.
Sitwell, Edith, editor. Wheels, 1918, Third Cycle. B. H. Blackwell, 1918.
Sitwell, Edith, editor. Wheels, 1919, Fourth Cycle. B. H. Blackwell, 1919.