Switch to English Switch to French

The Open University  |   Study at the OU  |   About the OU  |   Research at the OU  |   Search the OU

Listen to this page  |   Accessibility

the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Reading Experience Database UK Historical image of readers
  RED International Logo

RED Australia logo


RED Canada logo
RED Netherlands logo
RED New Zealand logo

Listings for Reader:  

Edith Sitwell

 

Click here to select all entries:

 


  

Edith Sitwell : poems

'. . . then Edith Sitwell appeared, her nose longer than an ant-eaters, and read some of her absurd stuff...'

Unknown
Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      

  

Hans Christian Andersen : Fairy Tales

'Whenever she felt morose or lonely she looked into books, and, having an insatiable curiosity, by the time she was three she had taught herself to read. Hans Christian Andersen's "Fairy Tales" became an early favorite. Some of the tales that she read again and again, it must have seemed, mirrored her own life. Aware that she had not inherited her mther's beauty, she was intrigued in particular by "The Ugly Duckling".'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Algernon Charles Swinburne : Poems

'When it was discovered that she liked Swinburne's poetry, Sir George demanded that she forego such sensual verse. If she had to read poetry, he pontificated, she should read Tennyson for beauty, Austin Dobson for charm, and Kipling for strength'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Alexander Pope : Rape of the Lock, The

[Sitwell said] 'I used to read "The Rape of the Lock" at night under the bedclothes by the light of a candle. It's a wonder I didn't set myself on fire. I had memorized it by the time I was twelve'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Robert Browning : [poems]

'Browning was a little beyond her. Convinced that he was a great poet, she still found him a bore at times. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a major disappointment: she thought "Sonnets from the Portuguese" were beautiful in emotion but simply not good sonnets'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Elizabeth Barrett Browning : Sonnets from the Portuguese

'Browning was a little beyond her. Convinced that he was a great poet, she still found him a bore at times. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a major disappointment: she thought "Sonnets from the Portuguese" were beautiful in emotion but simply not good sonnets'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Stephane Mallarme : [poems]

[her governess Helen Roothman] 'introduced Edith to the works of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarme. Though Edith had had a taste for Baudelaire through Swinburne's translations of the author of "Les Fleurs du mal", she found her governess' favorites even more to her liking'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Paul Verlaine : [poems]

[her governess Helen Roothman] 'introduced Edith to the works of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarme. Though Edith had had a taste for Baudelaire through Swinburne's translations of the author of "Les Fleurs du mal", she found her governess' favorites even more to her liking'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Arthur Rimbaud : [poems]

[her governess Helen Roothman] 'introduced Edith to the works of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarme. Though Edith had had a taste for Baudelaire through Swinburne's translations of the author of "Les Fleurs du mal", she found her governess' favorites even more to her liking'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Charles Baudelaire : Les fleurs du mal

[her governess Helen Roothman] 'introduced Edith to the works of Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarme. Though Edith had had a taste for Baudelaire through Swinburne's translations of the author of "Les Fleurs du mal", she found her governess' favorites even more to her liking'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Felicia Hemans : 'Casabianca'

'Edith, though a great reader, did not consume all and any poetry as a child; she was kept in regularly on Saturday afternoons at one time because of her refusal to learn by heart Mrs Hemans's "Casabianca" ("The boy stood on the burning deck..."). The reason for her recalcitrance was that "as everybody had left the Burning Deck, and he was doing no conceivable good by remaining there, why in heck didn't he get off it!"'

Century: 1850-1899     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

William Shakespeare : [unknown]

[Helen Roothman] 'brought Edith new poetry too - the French symbolists, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire - to enlarge her own rapt readings of Swinburne, William Morris, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Yeats'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

William Morris : [unknown]

[Helen Roothman] 'brought Edith new poetry too - the French symbolists, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire - to enlarge her own rapt readings of Swinburne, William Morris, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Yeats'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

John Keats : [unknown]

[Helen Roothman] 'brought Edith new poetry too - the French symbolists, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire - to enlarge her own rapt readings of Swinburne, William Morris, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Yeats'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Percy Bysshe Shelley : [unknown]

[Helen Roothman] 'brought Edith new poetry too - the French symbolists, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire - to enlarge her own rapt readings of Swinburne, William Morris, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Yeats'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

William Butler Yeats : [unknown]

[Helen Roothman] 'brought Edith new poetry too - the French symbolists, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire - to enlarge her own rapt readings of Swinburne, William Morris, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Yeats'.

Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

August Strindberg : The Inferno

'I have read The Inferno. It is wonderful, the most awful study of on-coming madness one could think of, and the strange thing is, it is entirely a writer's madness. I mean no one but a writer or artist of some sort would find significance in such small things.'

Unknown
Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      

  

Sydney Schiff : Prince Hempseed

'I have just read Prince Hempseed for the first time. I do hope you don't mind my writing to you about it, because I think it is such a fine book and I was deeply moved by it. It seems to me to be more alive psychologically than any novel by a living English writer that I have read, and one would have thought that even the impenetrable stupidity of the British public would have been pierced by the terible sincerity and truth of this book. But I suppose you've had the usual kind of abuse. I couldn't have believed, until I read Prince Hempseed, that any book about a child could be so interesting; but this goes beyond interest, and all I can say is, if the English people would read this book properly, they might become less brutish. It's an awful thing to think of poor sensitive bewildered children being driven into life like this, amidst such hopeless loneliness. I hope you don't mind me saying all this; but, you see, I do thinkthe book is such a fine achievement that I can't help telling you so. I wonder if Dr. Henry Head has read it. He's always saying he wishes someone would write a really fine book about a child's psychology....At least he said so on the few occasions when I have met him....'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Gertrude Stein : 'Sitwell, Edith Sitwell': a word portrait

'Dear Miss Stein, Thank you so much for your letter and the wonderful portrait, which followed me through Spain, and only reached me last night, on my return from Toledo. I read the portrait aloud at dinner to an audience of my two brothers, a young composer called William Walton, and a young painter called Richard Wyndham, and, tired as we were, it exhilerated, stimulated, at the same time calmed our nerves to the extraordinary degree. The sound and rhythm seem to me, if I may say so, inevitability itself - but nobody but you would have found this inevitability. You can have no idea what a delight it is to me that you are going to include this in the book. I am waiting for the appearance of that book with the greatest impatience, and I do hope Duckworth's will take it, because it is a nice firm, and it will be such a feather in their cap.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Manuscript: Letter, A 'word portrait' so possibly contained in a letter.

  

John Dryden : unknown

'.....I've been ill with heart trouble - why I can't imagine, as it has always been quite strong so Sachie lent me his country house for a fortnight. I sat on the verandah all day, reading and sleeping. I read a lot of Dryden, in a lovely first edition (Dryden was by birth a county neighbour, which accounts for the library being full of his work) - Pope, the life of Alexander the Great, of whom there is a portrait wearing a periwig, and delightful eighteenth century books about the moral worth of animals, praising the industry of the Bee, reproving the Ostrich for being a Bad Parent.....'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Alexander Pope : Life of Alexander the Great

'.....I've been ill with heart trouble - why I can't imagine, as it has always been quite strong so Sachie lent me his country house for a fortnight. I sat on the verandah all day, reading and sleeping. I read a lot of Dryden, in a lovely first edition ( Dryden was by bith a county neighbour, which accounts for the library being full of his work) - Pope, the life of Alexander the Great, of whom there is a portrait wearing a periwig, and delightful eighteenth century books about the moral worth of animals, praising the industry of the Bee, reproving the Ostrich for being a Bad Parent.....'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Sacheverall Sitwell : All Summer in a Day: An Autobiographical Fantasia

'The more I read the book, the more wonderful it seems to me. It is really a great book. Arthur says, and I more than agree with him, that the passage about Pyramus and Thisbe will, in the future, be regarded as one of the greatest passages in English literature. As I say, I agree, but the whole book in its entirety is to me like some wonderful and unspeakably moving music. It excites one, moves one, intoxicates one to an incredible degree. The worst is, it unfits one for daily life. To have to eat one's lunch in the middle of reading it is practically impossible. And I got, literally, no sleep after it, on Friday night. I couldn't sleep after it. This isn't talent - not even great talent- not even a great gift - it is genius. You know what my pride in you is. I am most terribly proud to be your sister.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

E M Forster : The Eternal Moment

'I can't tell you what delight and happiness The Eternal Moment has been to me, and I can't thank you enough for your very great kindness in sending it to me. Even though I was undergoing the horrors of a bad attack of influenza, I realised what a wonderful book it is. Well, all I know is that "The Machine Stops" made me feel as though I had come out of dark tunnel in which I had always lived into an immense open space, and were seeing things living for the first time. I believe it is the most tremendous short story of our generation. But then the whole book has got every quality of beauty and truth and illumination. I do think "The Point of It" is such a wonderful story too, and "The Eternal Moment" is enough to frighten one out of one's wits - but not to frighten one only. It is, in a way, the most terrifying ghost story I have ever read. The strange thing about these stories is that every time one reads them and I've read them all several times already, one finds fresh beauties in them. They seem to have an inexhaustible store.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

John Collier : His Monkey wife; or, Married to a Chimp

'His Monkey Wife isn't a work of talent; it is a work of genius - or the word genius doesn't mean anything. Anyhow, it is what I know to be genius. And I feel badly that I have only read it in its third impression........I don't think I know a work that contains more wisdom and more terifying and destructive wit. The word "wit" has been debased from meaning Swift to meaning that wretched buffoon Noel Coward. But you have wit as Swift understood it.........I don't think anything is left to be said now either about men's attitude towards women, or about women's inmost thoughts. I have always liked you very much but I think you are a most terrifying young man. How on earth do you know so much! I'm overwhelmed by the scope of the book, and its most apalling insight... Honestly, as exposing the point of view of a man towards an accustomed woman, and of the secret view a woman takes of herself, I don't know anything to touch the fancy dress ball scene....'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

John Aubrey : The Scandals and Credulities of John Aubrey

'Your preface to Aubrey is as delightful as it is learned, and Aubrey himself astonishes me more and more. Has there ever been a writer with more economy of phrase, or with a better gift of describing characters and appearances in two or three sentences? He seems to me to give every essential, and to cut off every wrapping which would take away from that essential. He is so companionable,too. I do think your valuation, your criticism, of him is one of the most discerning and enlightening pieces of criticism of our time, and I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you for giving me this book, so full of life, of warmth and of light....'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

John Hayward : Nineteenth Century Poetry - An Anthology

'It was so charming of you to send me your anthology,..............It is particularly interesting to me, because, although your anthology and my second, and third(forthcoming) anthology cover the same period, we rarely cover the same ground. I am jealous, as well as happy, that you have included the four heavenly Keats Odes, and Shelley's "To Night", one of the loveliest of all poems, and the beauties from "Prometheus Unbound". I am especially delighted, too, with your Tennyson, because with the exception of "Tears, idle tears" we touch different ground again, and that means that, when I am travelling, if I take your anthology and my anthologies, I shall be rich with nearly all the beauties I could need. We touch the same ground, again, in the inclusion of Rosetti's "The Woodspurge", but our choice of Christina Rosetti is different, for I have gone completely mad, and have included the whole of "Goblin Market". Your anthology includes more poets than mine; your taste, I think, is more catholic. But under the influence of your anthology I am beginning to feel positively calm about Matthew Arnold - a state which I did not think would ever be mine, on that subject......'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Charles Henri Ford ( with Parker Tyler) : The Young and the Evil

'Thank you for sending me your novel. I think that there is much good writing, and that you have a strong visual sense, but I do get tired of the perpetual pillow fights. Frankly, don't either of you young men know anybody who is capable of getting into his own bed and staying there? If you do for goodness sake cultivate his acquaintance, and write about him next time for a change. Also, calling a spade a spade never made the spade interesting yet. Take my advice, leave spades alone, or if you must mention them, then mention the garden too. All the miners round here - they are not an expressive race- use words which recur over and over again on your pages. But I don't find they add anything to my consciousness. No, no, you[should] develop your talent along different lines, and let us have some more writing like that page about the girl and the sailor - with the last phrase left out. P.S I mean that our forefathers, though an ignorant lot in some ways, were no more ignorant of the process of excretion than are their descendents today. But apart from medical treatises, these things do not in themselves make interesting reading. The prose rythms of your book really do deserve a more worthy subject, next time.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Ronald Bottrall : Festival of Fire

'Now I'm reading Festivals of Fire, which I had sent for before I got your letter; it was most charming of you to offer to send it it to me, and I think it remarkable, and it is obvious that you are a real poet. As I said before, the rhythmical quality of "The Loosening" its fluidity and perfect control, was most remarkable, and I never doubted that you have a most remarkable mind; all I wanted was more sifting of the material. When I know Festivals of Fire properly, I shall write to you again...'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Walter Greenwood : Love on the Dole

'I have just read Love on the Dole and His Worship The Mayor, books which were sent me by a friend a short time ago, for the second time, and I feel impelled to tell you that I know you to be, not only a born writer, but a great writer (and I never use that word lightly). I do not know when I have been so deeply, so terribly moved and so strongly impressed as I have been these two superb novels. How on earth you succeeded in combining the beauty and the unutterable tenderness of these books, their beautiful and inevitable form, with such an apalling indictment of our present damnable civilisation, I don't know. You are such a writer that the terrible tragedies of starvation, the people whose poignant and shining love, love between boy and girl, between husband and wife, love between friends, seem to me to have been known all my life.....'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Walter Greenwood : His Worship the Mayor

'I have just read Love on the Dole and His Worship The Mayor, books which were sent me by a friend a short time ago, for the second time, and I feel impelled to tell you that I know you to be, not only a born writer, but a great writer ( and I never use that word lightly). I do not know when I have been so deeply, so terribly moved and so strongly impressed as I have been these two superb novels. How on earth you succeeded in combining the beauty and the unutterable tenderness of these books, their beautiful and inevitable form, with such an apalling indictment of our present damnable civilisation, I don't know. You are such a writer that the terrible tragedies of starvation, the people whose poignant and shining love, love between boy and girl, between husband and wife, love between friends, seem to me to have been known all my life.....'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Friedrich Engels : Conditions of the Working Classess in England

'I have just been reading and digesting Engel's Conditions of the Working Classes in England, in intention, heaven knows, a noble work; but he can't write, so it raised anger in me, instead of grief. '

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

E M Forster : Alexandria: A History and Guide

'I cannot tell you with what delight I found your lovely history of Alexandria, and your most kind letter, awaiting me when I returned here on Thursday. ( I was delayed in London)the book has a beauty that makes one feel calmed -(at the moment I am reading the section on literature) as one feels calmed when looking at certain statues and listening to certain music. I am deeply grateful to you for sending it to me, and am proud to have it inscribed in your handwriting. I wish you could know what pleasure I feel in reading this book. Whilst I was in London, I found people tearing about, and declaring they could read nothing but newspapers. What a strange way of trying to retain one's sanity! For myself, I have been reading Nashe's Lenten Stuffe, and now I am reading Alexandria.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Alexander Pope : Poems

'That wonderful edition of Pope has appeared: and I can never thank you enough. You cannot know what a delight it is to me. It is truly wonderful for me to have all his works in this singularly beautiful edition. And apart from the joy of having it, it has come at a moment when I am about to collect, enlarge, and put together all my notes about his poetry, for this book on poetry I am working at. I am very glad, too, to have it from you. I hope you will inscribe it for me, when we meet. I have not nearly finished looking through it,even yet.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

  

Sacheverall Sitwell : Sacred and Profane Love

'I comforted myself last night when I couldn't sleep, by reading those truly wonderful passages about the shells and sea -nymphs in Sacred and Profane Love. What miraculous beauty.'

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell      Print: Book

 

Click here to select all entries:

 

   
   
Green Turtle Web Design