Edith Sitwell

Fülszöveg

Edith Sitwell is known to many who have never read her prose or poetry for her gothic appearance and her reputation for eccentricity. Unique, unconventional and gifted, she was indeed a unicorn among lions.
Edith began life as an odd, unloved child, but in her mid-twenties she found the courage to escape from a privileged but empty home life to a shabby flat in London, where she quickly established herself in the 1920s as an original and pioneering poet -Façade is part of modern cultural history. Her Plantagenet good looks attracted the photographer Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. A friend of Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, she rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and tormentedly loved the temperamental Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. She spent the 1930s in penury in Paris writing novels, poetry and biographies; then, Yeats hailed her as a major poet, and in the 1940s her poems found a wide audience in their expression of the horrors of war. In the next... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Edith Sitwell is known to many who have never read her prose or poetry for her gothic appearance and her reputation for eccentricity. Unique, unconventional and gifted, she was indeed a unicorn among lions.
Edith began life as an odd, unloved child, but in her mid-twenties she found the courage to escape from a privileged but empty home life to a shabby flat in London, where she quickly established herself in the 1920s as an original and pioneering poet -Façade is part of modern cultural history. Her Plantagenet good looks attracted the photographer Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. A friend of Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, she rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and tormentedly loved the temperamental Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. She spent the 1930s in penury in Paris writing novels, poetry and biographies; then, Yeats hailed her as a major poet, and in the 1940s her poems found a wide audience in their expression of the horrors of war. In the next decade she conquered New York and Hollywood, where she worked on the film script of her Fanfare for Elizabeth.
In this vivid and sympathetic portrait, drawing on Edith's brilliantly funny and often outrageous letters, Victoria Glendinning shows the spontaneous, gallant, generous, yet tragically insecure woman behind the public image. Though her literary achievement is a matter of controversy, this book charts her reputation and fills some gaps in the history of modern poetry.
With 16 pages of photographs including 4 pages in colour
Front cover: Detail from the 'interrupted' portrait of Edith Sitwell by Wyndham Lewis © Estate of the late Mrs C.A. Wyndham Lewis by permission. Vissza