Edith Sitwell as letter writer: Reading the letters to Siegfried Sassoon

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 1995 by Rand, Thomas

As was Edith Sitwell. Again one is reminded of the central place of poetry in her life, and of the strength of her personal loyalties.

Edith Sitwell will be remembered as a gifted and original poet and as one of the more colorful and interesting public personalities of her day. As the years pass and fewer contemporaries remain to give firsthand accounts of this remarkable woman, her letters to Sassoon will become even more valuable for the fascinating and entertaining glimpse they provide of her personality and life as a poet. Her letters to Sassoon will be valued, too, as a sustained portrait of a lively and entertaining letter writer of remarkable wit, determination, and vitality.

1 See Edith Sitwell: Selected Letters 1919-1964, edited by Lehmann and Parker. Richard Greene is currently working on a selected edition of Edith Sitwell's letters to be published by Little Brown. Excerpts of Sitwell's unpublished letters to John Lehmann are quoted in Jenny Lewis's "Edith Sitwell Letters." Raleigh Trevelyan quotes a remarkable letter Sitwell wrote to him on December 24, 1957, in "Two Ediths and a Hermit." Excerpts of otherwise unpublished letters are quoted in the biographies by Elborn, Glendinning, Lehmann, Pearson, and in Salter's memoir, as well as in Bradford's biography of Sacheverell Sitwell. Portions of this paper, as well as the entire text of WSU's collection of Sitwell's letters to Sassoon, appear in my dissertation, "The Letters of Edith Sitwell to Siegfried Sassoon."

2 The 104 autograph letters from Edith Sitwell to Siegfried Sassoon, Sassoon-Sitwell Papers, 1918-1957, (Cage 165),Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA, are nearly all that are known to survive. Three letters to Sassoon, one undated and the others dated December 5, 1930, and November 16, 1933, as well as two postcards, are located in the Columbia University Library. Internal and other evidence indicates that more were written and subsequently lost or destroyed. For example, the survival of two postmarked envelopes in the WSU collection addressed to Sassoon in Sitwell's hand indicates that two letters dated April 26 and April 28, 1928, respectively, have been lost or destroyed. The collection of letters at WSU, however, is almost certainly nearly complete. The fate of Sassoon's letters to Sitwell is a mystery. I have found only one of his letters to Edith Sitwell. Dated January 10, 1955, it is located in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

3 All quotations in this essay from Edith Sitwell's letters to Siegfried Sassoon are from the Sassoon-Sitwell Papers at Washington State University, and are used by permission of Mr. Francis Sitwell and WSU Libraries. Dates, when not supplied in the text, appear in parentheses. A date in square brackets indicates an editorial addition.

4 Rustic Elegies (London: Duckworth, 1927).

5 A clothing manufacturer noted for its woolen undergarments. Harold Acton mentions this incident in More Memoirs of an Aesthete (301), as does Edith Sitwell in Taken Care Of (127).