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 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 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 Aldous Huxley
Those friends of Aldous whom his wife Maria referred to as the brilliant ones,
Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley. Knopf; Harper & Row.
105
and found intimidatingly intellectual, included T. S. Eliot , Osbert , Edith , and Sacheverell Sitwell , various members...
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.
124-5, 135
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 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 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.
191
Babington Smith, Constance. Rose Macaulay. Collins.
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.
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.
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 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.
45
At home her literary friends included...

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.
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.