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 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
Friends, Associates Marianne Moore
MM corresponded with T. S. Eliot from 1921 until the year before his death. She was a friend of H. D. and of Bryher , and her editors believe that every one of her five...
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, 1986, pp. 27-33.
32
Bryher,. The Days of Mars. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
18
While in London, Bryher increased the...
Friends, Associates Gertrude Stein
It was John Lane and Roger Fry who introduced them to the Bloomsbury circle. The trip did not result in a publishing contract, as GS had hoped, but it did advance her reputation. The next...
Friends, Associates Ada Leverson
During the 1920s she came to count the Sitwells among her close friends. She once sent a laurel crown to Edith Sitwell , and she attended the first performance of Façade at the Aeolian Hall
Friends, Associates Violet Trefusis
VT strengthened her bonds with Osbert , Edith , and Sacheverell Sitwell , and formed others with Peggy Guggenheim , Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), François Mitterand , and Cecil Beaton .
Jullian, Philippe et al. Violet Trefusis: Life and Letters. Hamish Hamilton, 1976.
124-5, 135
Friends, Associates Aldous Huxley
Those friends of Aldous whom his wife Maria referred to as the brilliant ones,
qtd. in
Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley. Knopf; Harper & Row, 1974.
105
and found intimidatingly intellectual, included T. S. Eliot , Osbert , Edith , and Sacheverell Sitwell , various members...
Friends, Associates Violet Trefusis
Around the same period she began friendships with, among others, Edith , Osbert , and Sacheverell Sitwell , Rebecca West , and Nancy Cunard . She writes in her memoir of the scintilliating Sitwell triumverate...
Friends, Associates Muriel Spark
MS became extremely close to her landlady, Tiny Lazzari , who despite her name was Irish, and who not only lodged her but delighted in feeding her and acting as a gatekeeper to keep out...
Friends, Associates Ann Quin
In Connecticut she attended a party to celebrate the recent publication of Marguerite Young 's novel Miss MacIntosh, my darling. Commenting on this nearly two-thousand-page tome, AQ noted if Edith Sitwell had written a...
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...
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...

Timeline

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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.