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 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 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 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...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Taylor
Several shorter stories are gems. Two of them explore respectively the experiences of birth and of death, from the viewpoint of those on the fringes of the central event. Many stories are hard on women...
Intertextuality and Influence Christina Rossetti
CR was mourned in a sonnet by Michael Field shortly after her death. Her influence extended to many other poets of her own time or close to it, including Gerard Manley Hopkins , Rosamund Marriott Watson
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Winifred Peck
Her chapter-headings quote from Agnes Strickland and Edith Sitwell as well as an eclectic range of male authors from Homer onwards. Quotations abound in the text as well as the epigraphs, and not all of...
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...
Leisure and Society Rumer Godden
With books hard to come by, RG read and re-read those she had, often sent her by relatives and often new publications. She called Austenexactly what I need and likened herself to Emma.
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan.
207
Leisure and Society Amabel Williams-Ellis
AWE made her formal entry into society as a debutante, a change of status . . . important then for the young females of our sub-tribe.
Williams-Ellis, Amabel. All Stracheys Are Cousins. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
34
For herself and Edith Sitwell (debs at...
Leisure and Society Rumer Godden
Her literary standards of judgement were high. Among women poets she accorded major status only to Sappho , Christina Rossetti , Emily Dickinson —not Elizabeth Barrett Browning —and to the more recent Edith Sitwell and Marianne Moore .
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan.
218 and n
Literary responses Dorothy Wellesley
Yeats admired this volume for its explorations of the picturesque, for its love . . . for undisturbed Nature, a hatred for the abstract, the mechanical, the invented, and for an intensity which he saw...
Literary responses Carson McCullers
In England, Edith Sitwell called CMCa transcendental writer, and V. S. Pritchettthe most remarkable novelist to come out of America for a generation.
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, pp. 807-27.
815
The earliest full-length study of her, by Oliver Evans
Literary responses Christina Rossetti
As Rebecca W. Crump 's guide to publications on CR to 1973 reveals, her high reputation persisted after her death—she stood, according to Katharine Tynan ' article Santa Christina in 1912, head and shoulders above...
Literary responses Dylan Thomas
Thomas's first slim volume virtually made his reputation, which its successor consolidated.
Phillips, Adam. “A Terrible Thing, Thank God”. London Review of Books, pp. 22-4.
22
Well-known and respected reviewers were impressed, responding especially to the poems' palpable originality. The eminent Edith Sitwell became an instant admirer, and...

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