Sitwell, Dame Edith Louisa

Sitwell, Dame Edith Louisa (1887–1964), sister of O. and S. Sitwell. With her brothers she actively encouraged Modernist writers and artists; from 1916 to 1921 she edited Wheels, an anti-Georgian magazine, which first published W. Owen. Her first volume of verse, The Mother and Other Poems (1915), was followed by many others, and she quickly acquired a reputation as an eccentric and controversial figure, confirmed by the first public performance, in 1923, of Façade, a highly original entertainment (with music by W. Walton) with verses in syncopated rhythms. Gold Coast Customs (1929), a harsh and powerful work, compared modern Europe with ancient barbaric Africa. Her prose works include a study of Pope (1930), English Eccentrics (1933), and Victoria of England (1936). Her poems of the blitz and the atom bomb (Street Songs, 1942; Green Song, 1944; The Song of the Cold, 1945; The Shadow of Cain, 1947) were highly praised, but in the 1950s her reputation began to fade, as the new austerity of the Movement became fashionable. She remained, however, a considerable public figure, well known outside literary circles for her theatrical dress and manner and by her indignant response to real or suspected criticism.