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
Literary responses Dylan Thomas
Reviewers were not quite so generally enthusiastic as over his first collection. Edith Sitwell , however, this time published a review in the Sunday Times, and her praise prompted an energetic correspondence which helped...
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, 1948, pp. 11-16.
15
His championing of LBL 's work therefore tends to fall back on...
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 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 Penelope Mortimer
Edith Sitwell and Beverley Nichols testified to being enthralled
qtd. in
Mortimer, Penelope. About Time Too: 1940-1978. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993.
71
by PM 's reviews in the Sunday papers.
Gordon, Giles. “Obituary: Penelope Mortimer”. Guardian Weekly, 28 Oct. 1999, p. 26.
26
Literary responses Nina Hamnett
Crowley's counsel called the stories indecent, vulgar, and ignorant, and demanded that all copies already sold should be recalled and destroyed.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
4
NH then filed an affidavit saying that the stories were true according to...
Literary responses H. D.
HD's prose fictions met with less critical success than the poetry which she had published hitherto. Their word-play, symbolic structures, and manipulation of myth were seen as arbitrary, as distractions from rather than as elements...
Literary responses Gertrude Stein
Edith Sitwell reviewed Geography and Plays in 1923, and expressed reservations about its insuperable amount of silliness.
qtd. in
Brinnin, John Malcolm, and John Ashbery. The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and her World. Addison-Wesley, 1959.
280
A year later, in another review, however, she said that she had read almost nothing else.A representative...
Literary responses Kathleen Raine
Graham Greene responded to this book with what he called an enthusiastic if ignorant howl. Though he had already seen and admired some of her poems, he wrote, he had not realised the quantity of...
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...
Occupation Nina Hamnett
Several of old friends (including Osbert and Edith Sitwell ) sat for Hamnett for their portraits. Edith Sitwell's portrait especially attracted a good deal of comment.
Hamnett, Nina. Laughing Torso. Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1932.
98-9, 104-5
Occupation Gertrude Stein
Persuaded by Edith Sitwell and Harold Acton , GS agreed to a small lecture tour. She lectured about grammar and literature. She was apparently inspired to explicate her ideas on composition, rhythm, repetition and identity...
Occupation Viola Tree
VT gave a concert at the Aeolian Hall in London. She sang French songs, including some by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel .
The Æolian Hall was the venue for Edith Sitwell 's notorious...
Occupation Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
She served as the club's organizer and hostess. She intended it as a space where fledgling writers could gather and make contact with established authors. Her friend J. D. Beresford , novelist, was the club's...

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