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 Sybille Bedford
Introduced to Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria by the South African poet Roy Campbell while at Sanary, the young SB became their intimate friend.
Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint, 2005.
249-50
She was later embarrassed by her earlier admiration for...
Friends, Associates Dylan Thomas
DT 's huge roster of friends in London included the American writer Emily Holmes Coleman and his most significant early patron, Edith Sitwell . Before Sitwell reviewed his early poems he had mocked her in...
Friends, Associates Charlotte Mew
CM refused an invitation to visit Edith Sitwell after they met at the Bookshop in 1919.
Warner, Val. “New Light on Charlotte Mew”. PN Review, Vol.
24
, No. 1, 1997, pp. 43-7.
46
Fitzgerald, Penelope. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends. Collins, 1984, p. 240 pp.
191
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...
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 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...
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 Dylan Thomas
Thomas's first slim volume virtually made his reputation, which its successor consolidated.
qtd. in
Phillips, Adam. “A Terrible Thing, Thank God”. London Review of Books, 4 Mar. 2004, 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...
Literary responses Charlotte Mew
May Sinclair thought Madeleine magnificent, having depths & depths of passion & of sheer beauty.
qtd. in
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
191
She also enjoyed the high Victorian melodrama of Mew's reading aloud.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
192
Despite her efforts to bring The Farmer's...
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...

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