Edith Sitwell
A Unicorn Amongs Lions
Victoria Glendinning
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1981, 393 pages, 20 illustrated pages, 13 x 20 cm, ISBN 0297778013
euro 30,00
email if you want to buy [email protected]
Freed from her unhappy homelife, Edith Sitwell set up home in a shabby London flat: she became one of the best-known 1920s pioneering poets. Victoria Glendinning presents a biography of a woman known for her eccentricity and gothic appearance.
Her looks attracted Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. Among her friends were Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. She rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and ardently loved the temperamental Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. The 1930s she spent in penury, writing fiction, biography and verse. Only when Yeats hailed her as 'a major poet' did her work reach a wider audience, whereupon Edith Sitwell set off to conquer New York and Hollywood.
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, this is the definitive portrait of a spontaneous, gallant, yet tragically insecure woman.
'The excellence of Mrs Glendinning's book is that it remains wise and balanced while never sacrificing critical edge... It's hard to imagine a life of Edith Sitwell that could surpass it.' John Carey, "Sunday Times"
orders to: [email protected]
twitter: @fashionbooksmi
flickr: fashionbooksmilano
instagram: fashionbooksmilano
tumblr: fashionbooksmilano
16/02/23