Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Pride and Prejudice has been many times adapted for the theatre and for the large and small screens. Both A. A. Milne
and the Australian dramatist Helen Jerome
produced stage versions during the 1930s, 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.
249-50
She was later embarrassed by her earlier admiration for...
Textual Production
Theodora Benson
TB
dedicated Façade—another novel about gilded youth and a marriage which may or may not turn out happily—to her father
.
Her title had been more famously used by Edith Sitwell
in her suite...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Bowen
The authors whom EB
wrote of for the British Council in English Novelists are (as the commission required) canonical and mostly male. She was deeply influenced by Virginia Woolf
, and wrote after Woolf's death...
Literary responses
Lilian Bowes Lyon
Day-Lewis
, though he wrote enthusiastically of individual poems, feared before this volume's publication to make exorbitant claims that would darken judgement.
Day-Lewis, Cecil, and Lilian Bowes Lyon. “Introduction”. Collected Poems, Jonathan Cape, pp. 11-16.
15
His championing of LBL
's work therefore tends to fall back on...
Friends, Associates
Bryher
The flat became a gathering place for friends including the Sitwells (Bryher grew especially close to Edith
and Osbert
), Elizabeth Bowen
, and Ivy Compton-Burnett
.
Schaffner, Perdita. “Keeper of the Flame”. H.D., Woman and Poet, edited by Michael King, National Poetry Foundation, pp. 27-33.
32
Bryher,. The Days of Mars. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Collecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910-1950. Cambridge University Press, http://Rutherford HSS.
235 and n45
Textual Production
Bryher
Desmond MacCarthy
had launched Life and Letters in June 1928; it issued its last number this month, and Bryher's new publication first appeared in September. It merged it with the London Mercury after May 1939...
Reception
Bryher
The novel features an introduction by Edith Sitwell
, Bryher's friend and occasional collaborator. Sitwell's piece closes with her pronouncement that Bryher's text is a masterpiece.
Sitwell, Edith, and Bryher. “Introduction”. The Fourteenth of October, Collins, pp. 3-5.
5
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...
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.
217
Some poets became important to her in her youth through the influence of her sisters: Dylan Thomas
...
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.
36
Friends, Associates
Nancy Cunard
Her boredom with this life (her mother's social milieu) was something that she shared with her friend Iris Tree
, also a poet. Despite her antipathy towards it, this life presented her with important literary...
Textual Production
Nancy Cunard
NC
's poem Wheels gave the title to the series edited by the Sitwells
.Osbert Sitwell
Chisholm, Anne. Nancy Cunard. Knopf.
36-7
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Dickinson
Among our contemporary poets, Adrienne Rich
has offered this reading of ED
's life and works: Emily Dickinson—viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as partially cracked, by the twentieth century as fey or...
Timeline
1 January 1913: Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop at...
January 1933: The first number appeared of the periodical...
Writing climate item
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...
Writing climate item
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...
December 1965: Actress Peggy Ashcroft toured Norway with...
Women writers item
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
.
Texts
Sitwell, Edith. A Poet’s Notebook. Macmillan, 1943.
Sitwell, Edith. Alexander Pope. Faber and Faber, 1930.
Sitwell, Edith. Aspects of Modern Poetry. Duckworth, 1934.
Sitwell, Edith. Bath. Faber and Faber, 1932.
Sitwell, Edith. Bucolic Comedies. Duckworth.
Sitwell, Edith. Clowns’ Houses. Blackwell.
Sitwell, Edith. Collected Poems. Macmillan, 1957.
Sitwell, Edith. Elegy on Dead Fashion. Duckworth.
Sitwell, Edith. English Women. William Collins, 1942.
Sitwell, Edith. Façade. Favil.
Sitwell, Edith. Fanfare for Elizabeth. Macmillan, 1946.
Sitwell, Edith. Gardeners and Astronomers. Macmillan, 1953.