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Edith Sitwell : A Unicorn Among the Lions
Not until her twenties was the real Edith Sitwell born. Freed from her unhappy home life she set up home in a shabby London she became – almost overnight – one of the best-known 1920s pioneering poets. Her Plantagenet good looks attracted the photographer Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. She befriended Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. She rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and ardently loved the temperamental Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. The thirties she spent in penury, writing her novels, poems and biographies and it was only when Yeats hailed her as ‘a major poet’ that her work reached a wider audience and she set off to conquer New York and Hollywood. In this vivid and sympathetic portrayal, drawing on Edith’s brilliantly funny and often outrageous letters, Victoria Glendinning shows the spontaneous, gallant, yet tragically insecure woman behind the public image.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
Paperback
First published May 1, 1981
About the author
Victoria Glendinning
51 books47 followersBritish biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. She is President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was awarded a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.
Glendinning read modern languages at Oxford and worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974.
She has been married three times, the second to Irish writer, lawyer and editor Terence de Vere White, who died of Parkinson's disease in 1994.
Glendinning read modern languages at Oxford and worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974.
She has been married three times, the second to Irish writer, lawyer and editor Terence de Vere White, who died of Parkinson's disease in 1994.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 3, 2015
Glendinning, Victoria. Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions
Edith Sitwell today is something of a back-number, rather remotely off-Bloomsbury. Victoria Glendinning, however, brings Edith back to life in this crowded biography, insisting on her place in the field of Twentieth Century Letters, on one who was not merely an imperious figure who carefully selected her starlets for praise or punishment, but as a warm and insightful critic of the majority of poets and novelists she met in person or corresponded with in their absence.
This is a tightly packed account of the life of the ‘unwanted child’ who was born into aristocratic circles in 1887 and lived until December 9, 1964. She seems to have known, read or read about every living English writer of her generation, and it is as a member of the literati rather than as a poet that she is celebrated in this book.
The Sitwells as a family, especially the trio of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, are today seen as minor writers, dated and even effete, concealed in the shadows of Bloomsbury by such as TS Eliot and EM Forster, Edith being the brightest star by virtue of her social and entrepreneurial initiatives. She is a less powerful and exclusive Gertrude Stein, one always on the look-out for talent (Denton Welch), and who collects and nurtures genius (Dylan Thomas).
Glendinning makes short work of the love affairs of her subject, which to be honest are mainly one-way streets, although her subject’s poetry is suffused with unattainable longings suitably disguised. Some of Edith’s more waspish comments, found in her letters, are reserved for other women poets who are almost without exception ‘incompetent, floppy, whining, arch, trivial [and] self-pitying.’ She shows less asperity to the novelists although Virginia Woolf is given the brush-off. As for the left-wing radicals: ‘What a bore Master Auden is. And as for Master Spender … he is just a heightened and refined version of Mr W.J. Turner.’
Edith Sitwell is remembered today mostly for a handful of exquisite poems but mainly as a drama queen who wore outrageous clothes and was wont to burst forth in invective directed at poets she loathed. Neverthless she was genially disposed to any promising novice needing help. Hence her support for the Filipino José Garcia Villa who spun ‘sharp flame-like poems out of himself. Of course some of them are bad …’ but seven appeared in Horizon in May 1949.
Edith Sitwell today is something of a back-number, rather remotely off-Bloomsbury. Victoria Glendinning, however, brings Edith back to life in this crowded biography, insisting on her place in the field of Twentieth Century Letters, on one who was not merely an imperious figure who carefully selected her starlets for praise or punishment, but as a warm and insightful critic of the majority of poets and novelists she met in person or corresponded with in their absence.
This is a tightly packed account of the life of the ‘unwanted child’ who was born into aristocratic circles in 1887 and lived until December 9, 1964. She seems to have known, read or read about every living English writer of her generation, and it is as a member of the literati rather than as a poet that she is celebrated in this book.
The Sitwells as a family, especially the trio of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, are today seen as minor writers, dated and even effete, concealed in the shadows of Bloomsbury by such as TS Eliot and EM Forster, Edith being the brightest star by virtue of her social and entrepreneurial initiatives. She is a less powerful and exclusive Gertrude Stein, one always on the look-out for talent (Denton Welch), and who collects and nurtures genius (Dylan Thomas).
Glendinning makes short work of the love affairs of her subject, which to be honest are mainly one-way streets, although her subject’s poetry is suffused with unattainable longings suitably disguised. Some of Edith’s more waspish comments, found in her letters, are reserved for other women poets who are almost without exception ‘incompetent, floppy, whining, arch, trivial [and] self-pitying.’ She shows less asperity to the novelists although Virginia Woolf is given the brush-off. As for the left-wing radicals: ‘What a bore Master Auden is. And as for Master Spender … he is just a heightened and refined version of Mr W.J. Turner.’
Edith Sitwell is remembered today mostly for a handful of exquisite poems but mainly as a drama queen who wore outrageous clothes and was wont to burst forth in invective directed at poets she loathed. Neverthless she was genially disposed to any promising novice needing help. Hence her support for the Filipino José Garcia Villa who spun ‘sharp flame-like poems out of himself. Of course some of them are bad …’ but seven appeared in Horizon in May 1949.
August 14, 2022
This biography manages to present both the usual public view of Edith Sitwell (or at least, the view I had held) and a more personal view which gives a much more rounded and sympathetic picture. It also puts her in context in the circles of writers of her time. An enjoyable, fair and appreciative picture of a fascinating woman, living before her time.
May 29, 2023
Victoria Glendinning is one of my favorite biographers. Her writing is colorful and illustrative:
She describes some of Edith’s friends as “the most loyal of lame dogs” and writes, in speaking of Edith’s way of dealing with hurt feelings, “Edith found some satisfaction in picking her scabs.” In researching a long and busy life, it can be easy to get lost in the details, but Glendinning manages to find and follow the most notable threads woven through her subject's life, and to flesh out the story with engaging details.
Early in the biography, Glendinning writes of Edith, “Her experience of adult life was so circumscribed that it gave her little new life-material; only death-material. All she could do was to make Janus-turns between childhood and the grave.” Reading that on page 98, I did wonder what Glendinning would fill the next 250 pages with. But, in fact, the book gets more interesting. Ever heard of a jagger? An ornamental hermit? Glendinning is generous in giving us many perspectives on Edith from the pens of the famous and Edith knew almost everyone - Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Cecil Beaton and Gertrude Stein to name only a few.
I didn’t have much patience for Edith’s literary squabbles, yet I found that I liked her more as the book progressed, which may have been a result of Glendinning's own feelings. She writes in the Forward, “I have ended up with a great respect for her, and a very protective feeling, because of the loneliness and fear that were her almost constant companions.”
She describes some of Edith’s friends as “the most loyal of lame dogs” and writes, in speaking of Edith’s way of dealing with hurt feelings, “Edith found some satisfaction in picking her scabs.” In researching a long and busy life, it can be easy to get lost in the details, but Glendinning manages to find and follow the most notable threads woven through her subject's life, and to flesh out the story with engaging details.
Early in the biography, Glendinning writes of Edith, “Her experience of adult life was so circumscribed that it gave her little new life-material; only death-material. All she could do was to make Janus-turns between childhood and the grave.” Reading that on page 98, I did wonder what Glendinning would fill the next 250 pages with. But, in fact, the book gets more interesting. Ever heard of a jagger? An ornamental hermit? Glendinning is generous in giving us many perspectives on Edith from the pens of the famous and Edith knew almost everyone - Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Cecil Beaton and Gertrude Stein to name only a few.
I didn’t have much patience for Edith’s literary squabbles, yet I found that I liked her more as the book progressed, which may have been a result of Glendinning's own feelings. She writes in the Forward, “I have ended up with a great respect for her, and a very protective feeling, because of the loneliness and fear that were her almost constant companions.”
November 24, 2020
This is a detailed yet wonderfully readable biography of Edith Sitwell, poet and patroness of the arts throughout the first half of the 20th Century. The research is thorough (this was written in 1981 and some papers were only made accessible in 2000, but this does not detract from it in any way) but lightly handled so that I read it almost like a novel, not wanting to stop at the end of a chapter as I was keen to find out what the next would bring. The choice of quotes is brilliant, and together with Glendinning's sensitive analysis of Edith's character and psychology, Edith really comes alive as a person - and a unique, complex, witty and passionate one at that.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews