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
politics Bryher
H. D. , Edith Sitwell , Vita Sackville-West , Dorothy Wellesley , T. S. Eliot , and Walter de la Mare were among the readers at this event, which also received royal patronage.
Collecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910-1950. Cambridge University Press, 1999, http://Rutherford HSS.
235 and n45
Author summary Iris Tree
Twentieth-century poet IT published three volumes of poetry in her twenties and thirties and a long poem in her old age. Her poems also appeared in verse anthologies, most notably Edith Sitwell 's Wheels...
Publishing Wyndham Lewis
WL privately published The Apes of God, a satire attacking several writers of the 1920s, including Gertrude Stein , the Bloomsbury Group, and the Osbert SitwellSitwell s.
Oldsey, Bernard Stanley, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 15. Gale Research, 1983, 2 vols.
314
Parker, Peter, editor. A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers. Oxford University Press, 1996.
Reception Pamela Hansford Johnson
Unusually for her, PHJ felt convinced on completing this novel that she had written something really good. She was surprised when time went by with no response from her publishers. On enquiry, she found that...
Reception Dorothy Wellesley
W. B. Yeats , then aged seventy, discovered DW 's writing in 1935 when he was ill in bed and was at work on The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. He was feeling disillusioned...
Reception Bryher
The novel features an introduction by Edith Sitwell , Bryher's friend and occasional collaborator. Sitwell's piece closes with her pronouncement that Bryher's text is a masterpiece.
Sitwell, Edith, and Bryher. “Introduction”. The Fourteenth of October, Collins, 1954, pp. 3-5.
5
Reception Queen Elizabeth I
The immense and long-lasting interest aroused by Elizabeth is not, of course, primarily due to her writings, any more than were the adulation paid her during her lifetime, the cult of Gloriana, the Virgin Queen...
Residence Susan Hill
SH loved Scarborough, which she calls a dramatic town, both scenically and climatically.
qtd. in
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
139
During her childhood she enjoyed visiting the Scarborough home of the SitwellOsbert SitwellSacheverell Sitwell s; the family of poets and artists left...
Textual Features Iris Tree
The poems reflect key preoccupations of their time and of IT 's literary circle. They are shaped by admiration for the traditions and themes of later nineteenth-century French poetry, the Symbolists, and such English poets...
Textual Features Vita Sackville-West
Here VSW mentioned her dissatisfaction with the pessimism of T. S. Eliot and the self-advertising of the Sitwells , and voiced the hope for a poetry capable of seriousness and noble thoughts.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
168
Textual Features Dorothy Wellesley
The contents are arranged in thirteen sections, from Romance and Poems on Love to Life and Death, War, and Night and Sleep. They come from twenty-seven poets, of whom only five are...
Textual Features Rosamond Lehmann
They published some distinguished names—including Edith Sitwell , Rose Macaulay , and Ivy Compton-Burnett —and some promising newcomers, including Margaret Lane , Margiad Evans , and Jean Howard .
Hastings, Selina. Rosamond Lehmann. Chatto and Windus, 2002.
240-1
Textual Features Ada Leverson
Her daughter says that her story The Blow, published in a literary magazine in the 1920s (after she had met theSitwells ), was different from anything she had written before.
Wyndham, Violet. The Sphinx and Her Circle: A Biographical Sketch of Ada Leverson 1862-1933. A. Deutsch, 1963.
86
Textual Features Vita Sackville-West
It was to have been purposely old-fashioned, to combat the modernism represented by Edith Sitwell and her brothers.
Textual Production Iris Tree
Sitwell included five poems by Tree in the first cycle, eight in the second, and nine in each of the third and fourth cycles. The anthology, which extended to six cycles in all, also included...

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