Dame Edith Sitwell was the daughter of Sir George Sitwell and Lady Ida Sitwell of Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, and the granddaughter of Lord Londesborough. She was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire. She was educated privately. She and her brothers, Osbert (1892-1969) and Sacheverell (1897-1988), were to become probably the most famous literary family of their time.
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Dame Edith endured a miserable and lonely childhood, estranged from her parents. Until she was introduced by her governess to a new world of art, music and literature, particularly the French symbolists, to whose influence her early poetry owes a great deal. This influence led to a firm belief in the authenticity of one's own convictions and character.
She became well known for her highly flamboyant style, which derived a lot from poetry and drama. She fashioned extraordinary hats and tunics, with Elizabethan embroidery, and huge rings to highlight her long, slender fingers. She initially both shocked and amused people by her writing, eccentric behavior, and dramatic Elizabethan dress, but she later emerged as a poet of great human concerns and profound sensitivity. Her poetry is notable for its avoidance of outmoded metaphor and imagery, its technical dexterity, especially in the use of dance rhythms, and its ability ot communicate sensation and emotion.
Her first poem Drowned Suns was published in the Daily Mirror in 1913. She published her first book of poems, The Mother and Other Poems, in 1915, From 1916 she edited Wheels, an annual anthology of new verse. The poetry selected by Sitwell for these anthologies was not only self-consciously modern in style but was superciliously contemptuous of the flaccid and idyllic quietism of the so-called "Georgian poets."
In 1922, Sitwell published Facade, her most controversial poem to date, which, accompanied by the music of William Walton, was given a stormy public reading in London.
During World War II (1939-1945), Sitwell wrote poems about the blitz and other war issues, such as Still Falls the Rain, which describes a London air raid.
Most memorable, perhaps, were her three poems of the Atomic Age, inspired darkly by eyewitness descriptions of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. The Shadow of Cain, the first of the poems, was about "the fission of the world into warring particles, destroying and self-destructive.
In 1954 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In 1955, she was received into the Roman Catholic faith. She spent the last years of her life living in Hampstead, London. She died of heart failure in St Thomas Hospital, London, on 9th December, 1964, at the age of 77.
Her autobiography, Taken Care Of: The Autobiography of Edith Sitwell, was published posthumously in 1965, and her Selected Letters: 1919-1964, edited by John Lehmann and Derek Parker, saw the light in 1970. Since then, a new volume, The Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell, edited by Richard Greene, was first published in 1997.
