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The Sitwells

About:

The three Sitwell siblings – Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell – were poets, writers, and patrons of artists, who fashioned themselves as artistic leaders in the 1920s and 1930s, rivalling those in the ‘Bloomsbury Group’. They came from an aristocratic and wealthy family, and spent most of their childhood at Renishaw Hall, the family’s stately home in Derbyshire. In the 1910s, they moved to London. Their first venture was an annual anthology of modern verse called Wheels, edited by Edith Sitwell from 1916 to 1921, which collected the work of many young talents such as Nancy Cunard, Wilfred Owen and Aldous Huxley, as well as their own poems. The Sitwells achieved legendary status when Edith gave a reading of her poetry collection Façade in London’s Aeolian Hall in 1923; her poems were accompanied by orchestral music by William Walton, and the poet controversially spoke using a Sengerphone, with her back towards the audience. The Sitwells considered themselves as rebels against ‘philistine’ values and accepted artistic conventions. They thrived on hostile criticism and were united against their sworn ‘enemies’, many of whom were once their close friends, such as Noël Coward and Wyndham Lewis. The Sitwells became estranged from D. H. Lawrence over his publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).

All three Sitwells were prolific writers, but they are best remembered as cultural icons due to their style and personality. C. L. R. James, who recorded his meeting with Edith Sitwell in 1932, remembers how her reputation as an eccentric artist was well known in Trinidad, and, upon meeting her, he described her as ‘a striking figure [and] even more decidedly a personality’. The Sitwells defined themselves against the Cambridge-oriented Bloomsbury Group, but nevertheless had close relationships with many of its members, and were often spotted at its social functions. Mulk Raj Anand, in Conversations in Bloomsbury, records his meeting with Edith Sitwell at a party, and her conversation with D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. Edith was a close friend of Tambimuttu, and both she and Osbert were contributors to his Poetry London.

Published works:

Edith Sitwell:

The Mother and Other Poems (Oxford: Blackwell, 1915)

(ed.) Wheels: An Anthology of Verse (Blackwell: Oxford, 1916-21)

Clowns’ Houses (Oxford: Blackwell, 1918)

The Wooden Pegasus (Oxford: Blackwell, 1920)

Façade (Kensington: Favil Press, 1922)

Bucolic Comedies (London: Duckworth, 1923)

The Sleeping Beauty (London: Duckworth, 1924)

Troy Park (London: Duckworth, 1925)

Poetry and Criticism (London: Hogarth Press, 1925)

Elegy on Dead Fashion (London: Duckworth, 1926)

Rustic Elegies (London: Duckworth, 1927)

Popular Song, illustrated with designs by Edward Bawden (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928)

Five Poems (London: Duckworth, 1928)

Gold Coast Customs (London: Duckworth, 1929)

Alexander Pope (London: Faber & Faber, 1930)

(ed.) The Pleasures of Poetry: A Critical Anthology (London: Duckworth, 1930-32)

Epithalamium (London: G. Duckworth & Co., 1931)

Jane Barston, with a drawing by R. A. Davies (London: Faber & Faber, 1931)

In Spring, with wood engravings by Edward Carrick (London: privately printed, 1931)

Bath (London: Faber & Faber, 1932)

The English Eccentrics (London: Faber & Faber, 1933; revised and enlarged edition, London: Dobson, 1958)

Five Variations on a Theme (London: Duckworth, 1933)

Aspects of Modern Poetry (London: Duckworth, 1934)

Victoria of England (London: Faber & Faber, 1936)

Selected Poems (London: Duckworth, 1936)

I Live Under a Black Sun (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937)

(ed.) Edith Sitwell’s Anthology (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940)

Poems New and Old (London: Faber & Faber, 1940)

(ed.) Look: The Sun (London: Victor Gollancz, 1941)

Street Songs (London: Macmillan, 1942)

English Women (London: Collins, 1942)

A Poet’s Notebook (London: Macmillan, 1943)

Green Song & Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1944)

(ed.) Planet and Glow-Worm: A Book for the Sleepless (London: Macmillan & Co., 1944)

The Song of the Cold (London: Macmillan, 1945)

Fanfare for Elizabeth (London: Macmillan, 1946)

The Shadow of Cain (London: Lehmann, 1947)

A Notebook on William Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1948)

‘For T. S. Eliot’, in T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, from Conrad Aiken and Others, complied by Richard March and Tambimuttu (London : Editions Poetry, 1948), pp. 33-4

The Canticle of the Rose: Selected Poems, 1920-1947 (London: Macmillan, 1949)

Poor Men’s Music (London: Fore Publications, 1950)

(ed.) A Book of the Winter (London: Macmillan & Co., 1950)

(ed.) The American Genius (London: John Lehmann, 1951)

Gardeners and Astronomers (London: Macmillan, 1953)

‘Coming to London’, in William Plomer and Leonard Woolf (eds) Coming to London (London: Phoenix House, 1957), pp. 167-76

The Outcasts (London: Macmillan, 1962)

The Queens of the Hive (London: Macmillan, 1962)

Taken Care Of (London: Hutchinson, 1965)

Osbert Sitwell:

The Winstonburg Line: Three Satires (London: Hendersons, 1919)

Argonaut and Juggernaut (London: Chatto & Windus, 1919)

At the House of Mrs. Kinfoot: Consisting of Four Satires (Kensington: Favil Press, 1921)

Who Killed Cock-Robin?: Remarks on Poetry, on its Criticism, and, as a Sad Warning, the Story of Eunuch Arden (London: Daniel, 1921)

Out of the Flame (London: Richards, 1923)

Triple Fugue (London: Richards, 1924)

(with Margaret Barton) Brighton (London: Faber & Faber, 1925)

C. R. W. Nevinson, as O. S. (London: Benn, 1925)

Discursions on Travel, Art and Life (London: Richards, 1925)

Before the Bombardment (London: Duckworth, 1926)

England Reclaimed: A Book of Eclogues (London: Duckworth, 1927)

The People’s Album of London Statues (London: Duckworth, 1928)

Miss Mew (Stanford Dingley: Mill House Press, 1929)

The Man Who Lost Himself (London: Duckworth, 1929)

Dumb-Animal, and Other Stories (London: Duckworth, 1930)

Three-Quarter Length Portrait of Michael Arlen. With a Preface: The History of a Portrait, by the Author (London: Heinemann, 1930)

The Collected Satires and Poems of Osbert Sitwell (London: Duckworth, 1931)

A Three-Quarter Length Portrait of the Viscountess Wimborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931)

(ed. with Margaret Barton) Victoriana: A Symposium of Victorian Wisdom (London: Duckworth, 1931)

Dickens (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932)

Miracle on Sinai: A Satirical Novel (London: Duckworth, 1933)

Penny Foolish: A Book of Tirades and Panegyrics (London: Macmillan, 1935)

Mrs. Kimber (London: Macmillan, 1937)

Those Were the Days: Panorama with Figures (London: Macmillan, 1938)

Escape with Me!: An Oriental Sketch-Book (London: Macmillan, 1939)

(ed.) Two Generations (London: Macmillan, 1940)

Open the Door!: A Volume of Stories (London: Macmillan, 1941)

A Place of One’s Own (London: Macmillan, 1941)

(with Rubeigh James Minney) Gentle Caesar: A Play in Three Acts (London: Macmillan, 1942)

Selected Poems Old and New (London: Duckworth, 1943)

(ed. with Margaret Barton) Sober Truth: A Collection of Nineteenth-Century Episodes, Fantastic, Grotesque and Mysterious (London: MacDonald, 1944)

Left Hand, Right Hand! (London: Macmillan, 1945)

A Letter to My Son (London: Home & Van Thal, 1944)

Sing High! Sing Low!: A Book of Essays (London: Macmillan, 1944)

The True Story of Dick Whittington: A Christmas Story for Cat-Lovers (London: Home & Van Thal, 1945)

The Scarlet Tree (London: Macmillan, 1946)

Alive-Alive Oh! and Other Stories (London: Pan, 1947)

Great Morning! (London: Macmillan, 1948)

The Novels of George Meredith and Some Notes on the English Novel (London: Oxford University Press, 1947)

(ed.) Walter Sickert, A Free House! Or, The Artist as Craftsman (London: Macmillan, 1947)

Four Songs of the Italian Earth (Pawlet, Vt.: Banyan Press, 1948)

Laughter in the Next Room (London: Macmillan, 1948)

Death of a God, and Other Stories (London: Macmillan, 1949)

Demos the Emperor: A Secular Oratorio (London: Macmillan, 1949)

England Reclaimed, and Other Poems (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949)

Introduction to the Catalogue of the Frick Collection: Published on the Founder’s Centenary, 19 December 1949 (New York: Ram Press, 1949)

Noble Essences: A Book of Characters (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950)

Winters of Content, and Other Discursions on Mediterranean Art and Travel (London: Duckworth, 1950)

Wrack at Tidesend, a Book of Balnearics: Being the Second Volume of England Reclaimed (London: Macmillan, 1952)

Collected Stories (London: Duckworth, 1953)

The Four Continents: Being More Discursions an Travel, Art, and Life (London: Macmillan, 1954)

On the Continent: A Book of Inquilinics. Being the Third Volume of England Reclaimed (London: Macmillan, 1958)

Fee Fi Fo Fum!: A Book of Fairy Stories (London: Macmillan, 1959)

A Place of One’s Own, and Other Stories (London: Icon, 1961)

Tales My Father Taught Me: An Evocation of Extravagant Episodes (London: Hutchinson, 1962)

Pound Wise (London: Hutchinson, 1963)

Queen Mary and Others (London: Joseph, 1974)

Sacheverell Sitwell:

The People’s Palace (Oxford: Blackwell, 1918)

The Hundred and One Harlequins (London: Grant Richards, 1922)

Doctor Donne and Gargantua: First Canto, with drawings by Wyndham Lewis (London: Favile Press, 1921)

All Summer in a Day: An Autobiographical Fantasia (London: Duckworth, 1926)

The Thirteenth Caesar, and Other Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1924)

Exalt the Eglantine, and Other Poems, decorated by Thomas Lowinsky (London: The Fleuron, 1926)

Southern Baroque Art (London: Grant Richards, 1924)

German Baroque Art (London: Duckworth, 1927)

The Cyder Feast, and Other Poems (London: Duckworth, 1927)

Two Poems, Ten Songs (London: Duckworth, 1929)

The Gothick North: The Visit of the Gypsies (London: Duckworth, 1929)

Doctor Donne & Gargantua: The First Six Cantos (London; Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930; New York : G. Duckworth & Co., 1930)

Beckford and Beckfordism: An Essay (London: Duckworth, 1930)

Far from My Home, Stories: Long and Short (London: Duckworth, 1931)

Spanish Baroque Art, with Buildings in Portugal, Mexico and Other Colonies (London: Duckworth, 1931)

Mozart (London: Peter Davis, 1932)

Canons of Giant Art: Twenty Torsos in Heroic Landscapes (London: Faber & Faber, 1933)

Touching the Orient: Six Sketches (London: Duckworth, 1934)

Liszt (London: Faber & Faber, 1934)

Scarlatti (London: Faber & Faber, 1935)

A Background for Domenico Scarlatti, 1685-1757 (London: Faber & Faber, 1935)

Dance of the Quick and the Dead: An Entertainment of the Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 1936)

Collected Poems, introductory essay by Edith Sitwell (London: Duckworth, 1936)

Conversation Pieces: A Survey of English Domestic Portraits and their Painters (London: Batsford, 1936)

Narrative Pictures (London: Batsford, 1937)

Old Fashioned Flowers (London: Country Life, 1939)

Poltergeists: An Introduction and Examination Followed by Chosen Instances (London: Faber & Faber, 1940)

Sacred and Profane Love (London: Faber & Faber, 1940)

Mauretania:Warrior, Man and Woman (London: Duckworth, 1940)

The Homing of the Winds, and Other Passages in Prose (London: Faber & Faber, 1942)

Splendours and Miseries (London: Faber & Faber, 1943)

British Architecture and Craftsmen: A Survey of Taste, Design, and Sstyle during Three Centuries, 1600 to 1830, etc. (London: Batsford, 1945)

The Hunters and Hunted (London: Macmillan, 1947)

Selected Poems, preface by Osbert Sitwell (London: Duckworth, 1948)

Morning, Noon and Night in London (London: Macmillan, 1948)

The Netherlands (London: Batsford, 1948)

Spain (London: Batsford, 1950)

Cupid and the Jacaranda (London: Macmillan & Co., 1952)

Truffle Hunt (London: Robert Hale, 1953)

(with Handasyde Buchanan and James Fisher) Fine Bird Books, 1700-1900 (London: Collins, 1953)

Portugal and Madeira (London: Batsford, 1954)

(with Wilfrid Blunt) Great Flower Books, 1700-1900, edited by P. W. Synge (London: Collins, 1955)

Denmark (London: Batsford, 1956)

Arabesque and Honeycomb (London: Robert Hale, 1957)

Malta, illustrated by Tony Armstrong Jones (London: Batsford, 1958)

Bridge of the Brocade Sash: Travels and Observations in Japan (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959)

Austria, with photographs by Toni Schneiders (London: Thames & Hudson, 1959)

Journey to the Ends of Time (London: Cassell, 1959)

Golden Wall and Mirador: From England to Peru (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1961)

The Red Chapels of Banteai, and Temples in Cambodia, India, Siam, and Nepal (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962)

To Henry Woodward (London: Covent Garden Press, 1972)

Tropicalia (Edinburgh: Ramsay Head Press, 1972)

Agamemnon’s Tomb (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1972)

The Archipelago of Daffodils (Brackley: Smart & Co., 1972)

Auricula Theatre (Brackley: Smart & Co., 1972)

For Want of a Golden City (London: Day, 1973)

Brother and Sister: A Ballad of the Paralelo (Daventry: M. Battison, 1977)

Diptycha Musica: Living Dangerously (Daventry: M. Battison, 1977)

The Octogenarian (Daventry: M. Battison, 1977)

Nine Ballads; [and] Four More Lilies (Daventry: M. Battison, 1977)

Dodecameron: A Self Portrait in Twelve Poems with an Apologia in Prose (Daventry: M. Battison, 1977)

An Indian Summer: 100 Recent Poems (London: Macmillan, 1982)

Catalysts in Collusion: A Book of Catalysts (Badby: M. Battison, 1980)

Hortus Sitwellianus, with line illustrations by Meriel Edmunds (Wilton, Salisbury, Wiltshire: M. Russell, 1984)

Collaborations:

Sitwell, Edith and Sitwell, Osbert, Twentieth-Century Harlequinade and Other Poems (Oxford: Blackwell, 1916)

Sitwell, Edith, Sitwell, Osbert and Sitwell, Sacheverell, Poor Young People (London: Fleuron, 1925)

Sitwell, Osbert and Sitwell, Sacheverell, All at Sea: A Social Tragedy in Three Acts for First-Class Passengers Only (London: Duckworth, 1927)

Sitwell, Edith, Sitwell, Osbert and Sitwell, Sacheverell, Trio: Dissertations on Some Aspects of National Genius, Delivered as the Northcliffe Lectures at the University of London in 1937 (London: Macmillan, 1938; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970)

Connections:

Harold Acton, Kingsley Amis, Mulk Raj Anand, Michael Arlen, George Barker, Cecil Beaton, Clive Bell, Max Beerbohm, Maurice Bowra, Sylvia Beach, Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), Stella Bowen, Roy Campbell, Maurice Carpenter, Jean Cocteau, Cyril Connolly, Noël Coward, Anthony Cronin, Nancy Cunard, Bonamy Dobree, Valentine Dobree, Richard Eberhart, T. S. Eliot, Northrop Fry, Edmund Gosse, Grahame Greene, E. M. Foster, Roger Fry, Robert Graves, John Gawsworth, Graham Greene, Alec Guinness, John Hayward, Robert Herring, David Horner, Aldous Huxley, C. L. R. James, C. Richard Jennings, C. E. M. Joad, Maynard Keynes, Constant Lambert, D. H. Lawrence, Jack Lindsay, John Lehmann, Wyndham Lewis, Elkin Mathews, Somerset Maugham, Raymond Marriott, Charlotte Mew, Harold Monro, Alida Monro, Marianne Moore, John Middleton Murry, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen, William Plomer, Katherine Ann Porter, Ezra Pound, J. B. Priestley, Herbert Read, Max Reinhardt, George Russell, Siegfried Sassoon, Vita Sackville-West, Nikhil Sen, George Bernard Shaw, Sydney Schiff, Violet Schiff, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Walter Sickert, Stephen Spender, Gertrude Stein, Lytton Strachey, Meary James Tambimuttu, Pavel Tchelichew, Dylan Thomas, Feliks Topolski, Iris Tree, Sherard Vines, William Walton, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Waley, Denton Welch, Rebecca West, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Beryl de Zoete.

Contributions to periodicals:

Edith Sitwell:

Adam, Art and Letters, Athenaeum, Atlantic Monthly, Cambridge Magazine, The Chapbook, Coterie, Criterion, Daily Herald, Daily Mirror, Encounter, The English Review, Form, The Fortnightly Review, The Golden Hind, Good Housekeeping, The Graphic, Harper’s Bazaar, Horizon, Joy Street, Life and Letters Today, The Literary Digest, The Living Age, The Listener, London Magazine, The Nation and Athenaeum, The New Age, New Statesman and Nation, New Writing and Daylight, The Nineteenth Century and After, Oxford Outlook, Meanjin, Penguin New Writing, Poetry, Poetry London, Quarterly Review of Literature, Saturday Westminster Gazette, Saturday Review of Literature, The Sackbut, Sunday Express, Sunday Graphic, Sunday Referee, Spectator, Time and Tide, Times Literary Supplement, View, Vogue, Woman’s Journal.

Criterion (review of Charlotte Mew, The Farmer’s Bride and The Rambling Sailor, 9.34, October 1929, pp. 130-4)

Criterion (review of Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, 4.2, April 1926, pp. 390-2)

Weekly Dispatch (‘Who are the Sitwells – and why do they do it?’, 14, 14 November 1926)

Atlantic Monthly (‘Dylan Thomas’, 193.2, Feb 1954, pp. 42-5)

Poetry (‘Elegy for Dylan Thomas’, 87.2, 1955/1956, pp. 63-7)

Poetry (‘Roy Campbell’, 92.1, 1958, pp. 42-8)

Osbert Sitwell:

The Apple, Architectural Review, American Scholar, Art and Letters, Atlantic Monthly, Burlington Magazine, Bystander, Cambridge Magazine, The Cavalcade, The Chapbook, Cornhill Magazine, Coterie, Creative Art, Criterion, Daily Graphic, The Dial, The English Review, The Fortnightly Review, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Horizon, Life and Letters, Lilliput, The Listener, The Living Age, London Magazine, The Nation, The Nation and Athenaeum, National and English Review, New Chronicle, New Republic, New Statesman, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, New Writing and Daylight, Penguin New Writing, Poetry, Poetry London, Strand Magazine, The Queen, The Sackbut, Saturday Westminster Gazette, St Martin’s Review, Saturday Review of Literature, Sunday Referee, Spectator, The Studio, Times Literary Supplement, Town & Country, Vogue, Weekend-Review, Wine & Food, Yale Review.

Criterion (‘A German Eighteenth-Century Town’, 2.8, July 1924, pp. 433-47)

Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine (‘We Three’, 92.486, November 1933, pp. 64-9)

Spectator (‘A War to End Class War’, 163.5812, 17 November 1939)

Spectator (‘Roger Fry and Sir Osbert Sitwell, 174.6095, 21 May 1948)

Sunday Times (‘Bloomsbury in the 1920s’, 6 February 1949, p. 6)

Atlantic Monthly (‘Wilfred Owen’, 186.3, 1950, pp. 37-42)

Sacheverell Sitwell:

Architectural Review, Ark, Art and Letters, Atlantic Monthly, Burlington Magazine, The Chapbook, Country Life, The Countryman, Coterie, Criterion, The Egoist, Encounter, Foyer, The Fortnightly, Geographic Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, House and Garden, Housewife, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Life and Letters Today, Lilliput, The Listener, The London Aphrodite, Musical Times, My Garden, The Nation and Athenaeum, Nine, New Statesman, New World Writing, The New York Times Magazine, Picture Post, Poetry, Radio Times, Realités, Saturday Book, Strand Magazine, The Queen, The Sackbut, Spectator, Vogue.

Criterion (‘Three Variations [poem]’, 2.7, April 1924, pp. 296-9)

The Listener (‘Epstein on Himself’, 24.623, 19 December 1940)

The Listener (‘Nuptials of the East and West’, 56.1438, 18 October 1956, pp. 609-10)

Reviews:

Edith Sitwell:

Sherard Vines, Criterion 8.3, July 1929, pp. 710-15 (Gold Coast Customs, and Other Poems)

Wyndham Lewis, Time and Tide 15.46, 17 November 1934, pp. 1410-12 (Aspects of Modern Poetry)

Katherine Anne Porter, New York Herald Tribute, 18 December 1949 (The Canticle of the Rose)

Spender, Stephen, New Republic 152.17, 24 April 1965, pp. 19-20 (Taken Care Of)

Osbert Sitwell:

Conrad Aiken, Criterion 3.9, October 1924, pp. 141-4 (Triple Fugue)

C. E. M. Joad, Spectator 146.5369, 23 May 1931 (Victoriana)

O. W., Criterion 11.45, July 1932, p. 757 (Dickens)

Sacheverell Sitwell, Life and Letters Today 47.98, October 1945, pp. 52-60 (Left Hand, Right Hand!)

Sacheverell Sitwell:

C. P. A., Criterion 2.8, July 1924, pp. 486-9 (Southern Baroque Art)

Harold Monro, Criterion 3.10, January 1925, pp. 322-6 (The Thirteenth Caesar)

G. R., Monthly Criterion 5.2, May 1927, pp. 273-4 (All Summer in a Day)

John Gould Fletcher, Monthly Criterion 6.2, August 1927, pp. 168-72 (The Cyder-Feast and Other Poems)

Roger Hinks, Criterion 9.34, October 1929, pp. 155-7 (The Gothick North: The Visit of the Gypsies)

Geoffrey Grigson, Criterion 13.50, October 1933, p. 138 (Canons of Giant Art)

Orlo Williams, Criterion 16.63, January 1937, pp. 346-9 (Dance of the Quick and the Dead)

Bonamy Dobrée, Spectator 147.5378, 25 July 1931 (Spanish Baroque Art)

The Sitwells:

Richard Aldington, ‘The Poetry of the Sitwells’, Poetry 17, 1920/1921

Arnold Bennett, ‘Sitwells’, Adelphi 1.3, August 1923

Vivian Mercier, ‘Another Look at the Sitwells’, The Hudson Review 7.3, Autumn 1954, pp. 445-53

Stuart Fletcher, ‘The Tragedy of the Sitwells’, The Sackbut 9, August 1928, pp. 17-19

‘The Three Sitwells: A Study of That Trio of Ornaments of English Life and Letters’, Vanity Fair 32.6, 1929, p. 44

Secondary works:

Bradford, Sarah, et al., The Sitwells and the Arts of the 1920s and 1930s, 2nd edn (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996)

Cevasco, G. A., The Sitwells: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987)

Elborn, Geoffrey, Edith Sitwell: A Biography (London: Sheldon, 1981)

Fifoot, Richard, A Bibliography of Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell, revised edition (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1971)

Glendinning, Victoria, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981)

James, C. L. R., ‘Bloomsbury: An Encounter with Edith Sitwell’, in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. by Anna Grimshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 43-8

Lehmann, John, A Nest of Tigers: The Sitwells in Their Times (London: Macmillan, 1968)

Meegroz, R. L., The Three Sitwells: A Biographical and Critical Study (London: Richards Press, 1927)

Nandakumar, Prema, ‘Edith Sitwell: 1887-1964’ (obituary), Aryan Path 36.11 (November 1965), pp. 501-8

Pearson, John, Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (London: Macmillan, 1978)

Salter, Elizabeth Fulton, The Last Years of a Rebel: A Memoir of Edith Sitwell (London: Bodley Head, 1967)

Archive source:

Volume of manuscript poems by Edith Sitwell (1887-1964), Dept. of Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham

Edith Sitwell Letters, University of Sussex Special Collections

Osbert Sitwell, correspondence and compositions, MS Eng 1293, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library

Edith Sitwell Papers, 1932-1964 (bulk 1959-1962), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Dame Edith Sitwell Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

MS and letters, British Library, St Pancras

Letters, London Library

Thomas Balston: Papers of the Sitwells, 1924-1960, Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA

Letters, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Correspondence and literary papers, Historical Manuscripts Commission, National Register of Archives

Letters and literary MSS, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City

Dame Edith Sitwell Fonds (F0408), Osbert Sitwell Fonds (F0409), and Sacheverell Sitwell Fonds (F0410), York University, Toronto

Letters, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters from Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji Collection

The William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, ON, Canada

City of birth:

Scarborough, North Yorkshire (Edith and Sacheverell); London (Osbert)

Country of birth:

England

Other names:

Edith (Louisa) Sitwell (b. 7 September 1887; d. 9 December 1964)

(Francis) Osbert (Sacheverell) Sitwell (b. 6 December 1892; d. 4 May 1969)

Sacheverell Sitwell (b. 15 November 1897; d. 1 Ocotber 1988)

Location of death:

London (Edith); Montegufoni, Italy (Osbert); Towcester, Northamptonshire (Sacheverell)

Location:

Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire

Scarborough (another ancestral home)

Pembridge Mansions, Moscow Road, Bayswater, London (Edith Sitwell’s London home from 1914-1932)

Swan Walk, Chelsea (Osbert Sitwell’s London base until 1919)

2 Carlyle Square, King’s Road, Chelsea (Osbert Sitwell’s London home from 1919 to 1963)

The Sesame Club, 49 Grosvenor Street, London (Edith Sitwell’s residence)

Tags for Making Britain:

Dhanvanthi Rama Rau

About:

Dhanvanthi Rama Rau was born into a Kashmiri Brahmin family in the south-west of India. She attended Presidency College in Madras, graduating in 1917 with an honours degree and the Griggs Gold Medal in English, and progressing to an Assistant Professorship at Queen Mary’s College, Madras. She first arrived in England in 1929, when her husband Benegal Rama Rau, Financial Advisor to the Simon Commission, was asked to travel to England with the other members of the Commission for the writing of their report. Their daughters, Premila and Santha, then aged 9 and 6, travelled with them and became the first Indians to attend the Hall School in Weybridge. Initially the family lived at Oatlands Park Hotel in Weybridge, before moving to a flat in London when their daughters started to board at school. In her memoirs, Rama Rau describes the racism she experienced in 1930s England, and their struggles to secure a flat for this reason. The family were, however, in part protected by their social status and wealth which allowed them to travel throughout Europe when based in Britain.

In her memoirs, Rama Rau describes her work for organizations campaigning for Indian independence, which took her throughout Britain, as well as for a variety of women’s organizations. In 1932, with a group of Indian women based in London at the time, including Sarojini Naidu, she attended the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship in Berlin, leading the Indian delegation at the behest of Naidu. She continued to work for the Alliance and writes in her memoirs that the meetings gave her her ‘first experience of dealing with international work for women’s rights’ (p. 180). She also founded the Women’s Indian Association, an organization that aimed to provide links between Indian women in Britain and British women interested in India with Indian women in India. She was awarded the Kaisir-i-Hind gold medal by the British Government for her work with women’s associations.

In 1938, Rama Rau’s husband, by then Deputy High Commissioner for India, was called to South Africa by the High Commission. She followed him there, leaving her daughters in the care of a Jewish lodger, Lilian Ulanowsky. War broke out while all of the family were in South Africa the following year, and it was this that triggered their return to India.

Finally settled in Bombay in 1941, Rama Rau immersed herself again in social welfare activities, joining several women’s organizations, including the All-India Women’s Conference of which she was elected President in 1946. The squalid conditions of the Bombay slums led Rama Rau to establish the Family Planning Association of India of which she became President. She also served as President of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Published works:

An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1977)

Example:

An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1977), pp. 170-1

Date of birth:

01 Jan 1893

Content:

This is Dhanvanthi Rama Rau’s autobiography in which she describes her stay in England.

Connections:

Annie Besant, Sarojini Naidu, Motilal Nehru, Sylvia Pankhurst, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, Santha Rama Rau, Eleanor Rathbone.

All-India Women’s Conference, British Commonwealth League, Family Planning Association of India, International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Townswomen’s Guilds, Women Citizens Associations, Women’s Indian Association.

Precise DOB unknown:

Extract:

I was comparatively young, excitable when slighted, somewhat rash and certainly courageous enough to face so important a person as Eleanor Rathbone in the chair, and women in the audience like Sylvia Pankhurst and Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, stalwarts of the exceedingly controversial suffragette movement. I asked for permission to speak, and was graciously allowed five minutes. I did not speak on any of the subjects on the agenda, but merely disputed the right of British women to arrange a conference on Indian social evils in London, when all the speakers were British and many of them had never even visited India. Not one of them had even asked if there were any Indian women’s organizations that were dealing with the problems on the spot, the same problems that British women were exploring from the great and deceptive distance of fifteen thousand miles. I added that, even though we had offered to help with the conference when arrangements were being made, our offer had been ignored. I told them that educated Indian women were working in every province of their country to eradicate social evils and outmoded customs and prejudices, and we refused to accept the assertion that the removal of social evils in Indian society was the responsibility of the British. We were already assuming the responsibility ourselves, and we were sure we could be more successful than outsiders, especially those who were ignorant of the cultural patterns of our social groups and therefore could not be as effective as our own social reformers.

Secondary works:

Burton, Antoinette, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007)

Relevance:

Here, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau describes her uninvited participation in a ‘Conference on Indian Social Evils’ called by the MP Eleanor Rathbone. The passage provides a fascinating historical example of western ‘feminist’ constructions of South Asian women as passive and in need of ‘saving’ from cultural and patriarchal constraints. Rama Rau’s intervention here can be read as an act of political resistance against colonialist forms of feminism. Her assertive behaviour offers a glimpse of the ways in which female South Asian subjects might have impacted on British cultural and political life in this early period of migration.

Involved in events:

Simon Commission, 1930
Round Table Conferences, 1930-2

City of birth:

Hubli

Country of birth:

India

Location

Oatlands Park Hotel

Oatlands Drive Surrey

Weybridge, KT13 9HB

United Kingdom

51° 22' 39.4608" N, 0° 26' 6.0576" W

See map: Google Maps

Date of death:

01 Jan 1987

Precise date of death unknown:

Date of 1st arrival in Britain:

01 Jan 1929

Precise 1st arrival date unknown:

Dates of time spent in Britain:

1929-30, 1930-4

Tags for Making Britain:

Santha Rama Rau

About:

Born in 1929 to Benegal Rama Rau, a member of the Round Table Conference, financial advisor to the Simon Commission and ambassador, and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, a pioneer of birth control and president of the All-India Women’s Conference, Santha Rama Rau was a journalist, dramaturge and travel writer. She travelled widely throughout her life, moving to England with her family in 1929, when just six years old, because of her father’s involvement with the Simon Commission. During the 1930s, she attended a Quaker school in Weybridge, Surrey, with her older sister Premila, before moving on to St Paul’s School, London. Her book Gifts of Passage describes the years of her childhood as ‘spent in English schools and in holidays on the Continent’ (p. 23), which underlines the cosmopolitan, elite character of her life. When in London, her parents took in refugees from concentration camps, including Lilian Ulanowsky, a Jewish refugee from Vienna who became guardian for the sisters when their mother went to join their father in South Africa. The family were all in South Africa during the outbreak of the Second World War. Unable to get passage back to England, they decided to return to India, when Santha was 16, to stay with the children’s grandmother. Rama Rau describes returning to India and experiencing nostalgia for Britain in her Home to India, the book which launched her career as a writer and was published when she was just 22 years old.

Rama Rau completed her university education at Wellesley College in the US in 1944, and made her home in New York City from the early 1950s. She married the diplomat Faubion Bowers, an expert on Asian arts and theatre. The two travelled together through Southeast Asia, Africa and Soviet Russia. They had a son together but later divorced, and Rama Rau went on to marry Gurdon Wallace Wattles in 1970.

In her book on Rama Rau, Antoinette Burton describes ‘the modicum of fame [she] achieved’ as resulting ‘mainly from her success at being recognized as an authority on India on the eve of independence’ (p. 4). To the ‘West’, she offered an ‘insider’s view’ of Indian culture, countering stereotyping and Orientalist misrepresentations, especially in This is India. Her literary achievement that is perhaps best known in Britain is her adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India for the stage, produced on Broadway in 1962 after runs in Oxford and London, which served as the basis of David Lean’s 1985 film of the novel.

Published works:

Home to India (New York: Harper, 1945)

East of Home (New York: Harper, 1950)

This is India (New York: Harper, 1954)

A View to the Southeast (New York: Harper Brothers, 1957)

My Russian Journey (New York: Harper, 1959)

A Passage to India: A Play by Santha Rama Rau from the Novel by E. M. Forster (London: Edward Arnold, 1960)

Gifts of Passage (New York: Harper & Row, 1961)

The Cooking of India (New York: Time-Life Books, 1969)

The Adventuress (New York: Dell, 1970)

Example:

Rama Rau, Santha, Gifts of Passage (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961), pp. 23-4

Date of birth:

24 Jan 1923

Content:

This book comprises a series of short stories prefaced with brief autobiographical passages which provide a context to the stories. The stories loosely follow the first thirty years of Rama Rau’s life.

Connections:

E. M. Forster (adapted his A Passage to India for the stage), Sarojini Naidu, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (mother).

Contributions to periodicals:

'Letter from Bombay', New Yorker (3 May 1952)

Holiday (October 1953) [Cover story on India]

Travel Bazaar: India, an Explorer’s Country’,Harper's Bazaar (September 1957), pp. 106, 308

Holiday (series of articles on Southeast Asia; July, August, September 1955; February, July, August, September 1956; August 1957)

Reviews:

New York Times

Extract:

In London we could not, of course, help knowing a good deal about what was going on in India. My father, as Deputy High Commissioner for India, was inextricably involved in many of the developments, and conversation at home was full of references to the growing power of the nationalist movement, of the imprisoning of Indian leaders, of Mahatma Gandhi’s revolutionary ideas…We talked about Gandhi, Nehru, Sapru, Rajagopalachari, and countless other names that became great in Indian history in their own time. Some of them were related to our family, many were personal friends. It was a curiously intimate yet distant view of India’s progress.

Meanwhile all around us in Europe, we got a similarly personal though far less exalted view of the events that were shaping our generation. On French beaches we might meet groups of Hitler Youth on some kind of organized walking tour. At school in England we might be asked to support the international youth camps of the League of Nations. Like so many of our friends, we took in refugees from Dachau and other concentration camps until they could find places of their own in London or get a work permit or a visa to America. My sister, with thousands of idealistic people of her age, felt strongly about the Spanish Civil War, and I, deeply impressed by her sentiments, fell in love with a young man I had never met only because he wrote beautiful poetry and was killed in Spain.

All this was, naturally, quite typical of the generation that grew up in Europe between the wars. The only thing that set us apart in our minds was that we would return to India to live, that eventually our loyalties would be tied to a country that was growing daily less familiar.

Secondary works:

Burton, Antoinette, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007)

Rama Rau, Dhanvanthi, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1978) [1977]

Relevance:

The autobiographical passage is highly suggestive of the cosmopolitan lifestyle which Santha Rama Rau led for much of her childhood and adulthood. Her description of the way in which she was shaped by events in England, Europe and India position her as an elite transnational subject, crossing boundaries of nation with relative ease. Her privileged social background is also clear from her personal connections with major figures in Indian history, as well as the fact that her migrant family were able to offer shelter to refugees during the war. Indeed, this last subverts conventional constructions of Indians in Britain as in need of shelter and patronage, and emphasizes the role of class as well as ‘race’ in shaping the position of minorities. Rama Rau’s relationship with India – defined by both intimacy and distance – anticipates contemporary descriptions and discussions of the South Asian diasporic experience.

Archive source:

Santha Rama Rau Papers, Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University

City of birth:

Madras

Country of birth:

India

Current name city of birth:

Chennai

Current name country of birth:

India

Other names:

Vasanthi Rama Rau

Santha Rama Rau Wattles

Locations

St Paul's Girls' SchoolLondon, W6 7BS

United Kingdom

51° 29' 27.4596" N, 0° 14' 2.5872" W

See map: Google Maps

Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 9EE

United Kingdom

51° 22' 53.4216" N, 0° 26' 58.7472" W

See map: Google Maps

Date of death:

21 Apr 2009

Location of death:

USA

Date of 1st arrival in Britain:

01 Jan 1929

Precise 1st arrival date unknown:

Dates of time spent in Britain:

1930-9

Tags for Making Britain:

Ahmed Ali

About:

Ahmed Ali, best known for his acclaimed literary fiction, was born to Syed Shujauddin, a civil servant, and Ahmad Kaniz Asghar Begum in 1910. Ali attended Wesley Mission High School in Azamgarh and Government High School in Aligarh before beginning his studies in 1926 at Aligharh Muslim University where he met Raja Rao and their English poetry tutor Eric C. Dickinson (Ali’s first mentor), and published his first poem in Aligarh Magazine. Just a year later he transferred to Lucknow University, where he published his first short story and graduated, in 1930, with the highest marks in English in the history of the university.

In 1931, Ali gained his MA from the same institution and became a lecturer there. It was in this year that he also met Sajjad Zaheer and Mahmaduzaffar. With Rashid Jahan, the daughter of the well-known advocate of women's education in India, Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, the three men produced an anthology of short stories titled Anghare ('Burning Coals') which, because of its political radicalism and also, according to some, obscenity, provoked considerable hostility and was eventually banned. In the wake of this controversy, the four writers became involved in the All-India Progressive Writers' Association which had its beginnings in London in 1934 but its first official meeting in Lucknow in 1936. Ali also published his own first collection of short stories, Sho’le (‘Flames’) in that year.

Soon after the inception of the AIPWA, a rift developed within it; Ali disagreed with Zaheer and others about the function of literature within society, arguing that it should not be reduced to political propaganda. He severed his connections with the association, departing for London in 1939 with the manuscript of his first novel Twilight in Delhi. He remained in Britain for just over a year. During this time, he mixed with writers, both Indian and English. Introduced to E. M. Forster by his distant relative Syed Ross Masood, Ali became good friends with him and was introduced by him into London’s literary circles and, in particular, the Bloomsbury Group. He was one of the editors of the magazine Indian Writing, had short fiction published in John Lehmann’s journal New Writing, and was successful in securing a publishing deal for his first novel, Twilight in Delhi, with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press.

On his return to India, Ali was appointed Director of Listener Research for the BBC, Delhi. In 1944, he left this post and was appointed Professor of English at Presidency College, Calcutta. In the following year, he attended the first All-India PEN conference in Jaipur, with Forster as chief speaker. Later, he founded Pakistan PEN with Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy. In China during the partition of the Indian subcontinent, Ali moved to Karachi in the newly formed Pakistan on his return and began a career in the diplomatic service which took him back to China and to Morocco. He was eventually retired from government service by General Muhammad Ayub Khan’s military regime in 1960, and went on to start up his own business. He was married to Bilquis Jahan and had three sons and a daughter.

During his lifetime, Ali published several more volumes of short stories in Urdu, as well as anthologies of English translations of Urdu poetry, the first anthology of Pakistani writing in English translation, the first anthology of Indonesian poetry in English translation, a study of China’s Muslim population, and his second and third novels (1964, 1985), continuing to produce new works until his death.

Published works:

‘When the Funeral Was Crossing the Bridge’, Lucknow University Journal (1929) [short story]

‘Mahavaton ki ek Rat’, Humayun (1931) [short story]

(ed. with Zaheer, Jahan, Mahmuduzaffar) Angare (‘Burning Coals’) (1932) [short stories]

Shole (‘Flames’), 1932 [poems]

Twilight in Delhi (London: Hogarth Press, 1940) [novel]

Hamari Gali (‘Our Lane’) (1942) [short stories]

Qaid Khana (‘Prison House’) (1944) [short stories]

Maut se Pahle (‘Before Death’) (1945) [short stories]

(ed.) The Flaming Earth: Poems from Indonesia (1949) [poems]

Muslim China (1949) [non-fiction]

(ed. and trans.) The Falcon and the Hunted Bird (1950) [poems]

(ed.) Pakistan PEN Miscellany (1950) [short stories]

Purple Gold Mountain: Poems from China (1960) [poems]

(ed. and trans.) The Bulbul and the Rose (1960) [poems]

Ocean of Night (1964) [novel]

(ed. and trans.) Ghalib: Selected Poems (1969) [poems]

(ed. and trans.) The Golden Tradition (1973) [poems]

(trans.) Qur’an (Akrash Publishing, 1984; Princeton University Press, 1988)

Rats and Diplomats (1985) [novel]

Example:

Coppola, Carlo, ‘Ahmed Ali in Conversation: An Excerpt from an Interview’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, pp. 19, 21-2

Date of birth:

01 Jul 1910

Content:

In this interview, Ahmed Ali recalls his visit to England, focusing in particular on his friendship with E. M. Forster and other writers in the Bloomsbury Group, and describing the events surrounding the publication of his first novel Twilight in Delhi by Hogarth Press in 1940.

Connections:

J. R. Ackerley, Harold Acton, Mulk Raj Anand, E. M. Forster, Attia Hosain, Rashid Jahan, Beatrix Lehmann, John Lehmann, Rosamond Lehmann, Desmond MacCarthy, Harold Nicolson, George Orwell, Raja Rao, K. S. Shelvankar, Iqbal Singh, Sasadhar Sinha, Stephen Spender, Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy, M. J. Tambimuttu, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Sajjad Zaheer.

Contributions to periodicals:

New Writing (‘Our Lane’, 4, Autumn 1937)

Indian Writing (extract from Twilight in Delhi, 1, 1940)

Reviews:

Bonamy Dobree, Spectator, 8 November 1940

Maurice Collis, Time and Tide, 30 November 1940

Desmond Hawkins, New Statesman 20, July – Dec 1940

Extract:

I built up quite a wide variety of friends from various groups: Lehmann’s group, Forster’s group, and there was another was another group of younger poets and writers – there were so many of them, and I was so happy in that world; it was a wonderful world, in spite of the blackout, in spite of its dreariness. It had its own richness, a richness which the bright-lit, neon-signed London of today will never know again.

…

Lehmann…asked me to come to lunch. I went to lunch and was disappointed that the printers would not print the book as it was. They felt that it was subversive to law and order and, until such-and-such a chapter and such-and-such portions of the novel were deleted, it would not be published.

I was very saddened, but what could I do? Lehmann said, 'Ahmed, I’m so sorry that this has happened. What a wonderful book it is! Why don’t you just delete these portions.' I answered, 'John, I cannot! Nothing can persuade me to cut those sections out of the book; they’re part of a whole. They are the quintessence of the book – the portions dealing with the durbar and comments about the 1857 Rebellion – I could not.'

And even towards the end of lunch Lehmann, who was anxious just to get the book out, kept on saying to cut out the problematic sections. Finally I agreed to one condition: if Morgan Forster says they should be deleted, I would do so. Lehmann agreed. Then we discussed who should send it to Morgan, he or I. I thought that he, as the publisher, should send it to Forster. So he wrote Forster, who responded, 'Unfortunately, you cannot cut out any portion without emasculating the whole.' That pleased me very much but John Lehmann was disappointed. But what could he do! He’d lost the bet, and I had won.

Secondary works:

Anderson, David, ‘Ahmed Ali and Twilight in Delhi’, Mahfil, A Quarterly of South Asian Literature (now Journal of South Asian Literature) 7.1-2 (1971), pp. 81-6

Askari, Muhammad Hasan, ‘Ahmad Ali ka ek Navil’ (‘A Novel by Ahmed Ali’), Makhzan, Lahore (1949)

Coppola, Carlo, ‘Ahmed Ali (1910–1994): Bridges and Links, East and West’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, pp. 49-53

Coppola, Carlo, ‘Ahmed Ali in Conversation: An Excerpt from an Interview’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, pp. 11-26

Relevance:

This extract demonstrates the immersion of this South Asian Muslim writer in London’s literary circles of the 1930s and 1940s. The apparent ease with which he socializes with this renowned and elite set of writers is suggestive of Ali’s privileged social class and of the way in which class status could cut across barriers of race and religion. Also of interest here is the reluctance of the printers and also of Lehmann (a left-wing editor/publisher) to publish a book whose content could be perceived as anti-British – indicative of the processes of censorship that were at work in the final years of empire. Worthy of note is Ali’s implicit motivation for wanting to retain the problematic sections – his belief that they were integral to the coherence of the novel, rather than a political (anti-colonial) objective. This recalls Ali’s break with the IAPWA on the grounds that this organization was leaning towards a reduction of literature to political propaganda, and relates to questions of how far the work of Indian writers in this period of struggle for independence was shaped by political concerns.

City of birth:

Delhi

Country of birth:

India

Date of death:

14 Jan 1994

Location of death:

Karachi, Pakistan

Date of 1st arrival in Britain:

04 Aug 1939

Dates of time spent in Britain:

4 August 1939 - September 1949