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 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...
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 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

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