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 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 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 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...
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...
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 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 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...
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, 1987.
207
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, 1987.
218 and n
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, 1983.
34
For herself and Edith Sitwell (debs at...
Literary responses Ruth Pitter
Belloc 's preface quotes a passage from RP and compares it with lines by Rudyard Kipling and by Edith Sitwell to argue Pitter's superiority to either of these distinguished poets in the classical spirit.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
1318 (5 May 1927): 316
Literary responses Vita Sackville-West
The enthusiastic review by J. C. Squire was not entirely welcome to VSW , since she regarded Squire as a silly old ass and all that.
qtd. in
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
167
She feared being relegated to the category of...
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.
qtd. in
Dews, Carlos L., and Carson McCullers. “Chronology and Notes”. Complete Novels, Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, 2001, pp. 807-27.
815
The earliest full-length study of her, by Oliver Evans
Literary responses Lady Margaret Sackville
Whitney Womack has recently written that LMS 's war poetry should be read alongside the war poetry of Rupert Brooke , Edward Thomas , Wilfred Owen , Siegfried Sassoon , and Isaac Rosenberg , as...

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