Biography stevie smith

Because of this upbringing, she became extremely independent. When Smith was five years old, she suffered from tubercular peritonitis and admitted to the hospital for three years. The poems seem simple, almost as if written by a child, on the surface; they argue with God, are rude about people she dislikes especially those who act cruelly, either to other people or animalsand give sharp and critical descriptions of how people behave to each other.

They are often very funny, but there is also sadness at the loneliness and un-happiness of some lives, as in her poem on the man drowning at sea who waved his arms to the people on land to show them that he needed help - but they thought he was only waving to say hello. Smith was celibate for most of her life, although she rejected the idea that she was lonely as a result, alleging that she had a number of intimate relationships with friends and family that kept her fulfilled.

There is no reason to be sad, it is a good thing. Smith died of a brain tumour on 7 March Her last collection, Scorpion and other Poems was published posthumously inand the Collected Poems followed in Three biographies stevie smith were republished and there was a successful play based on her life, Stevie, written by Hugh Whitemore. Fiction Smith wrote three novels, the first of which, Novel on Yellow Paper, was published in Apart from death, common subjects in her writing include loneliness; myth and legend; absurd vignettes, usually drawn from middle-class British life; war; human cruelty; and religion.

All her novels are lightly fictionalised accounts of her own life, which got her into trouble at times as people recognised themselves. Smith said that two of the male characters in her last book are different aspects of George Orwell, who was close to Smith. There were rumours that they were lovers; he was married to his first wife at the time.

Novel on Yellow Paper Cape, Smith's first novel is structured as the random typings of a bored secretary, Pompey. She plays word games, retells stories from classical and popular culture, remembers events from her childhood, gossips about her friends and describes her family, particularly her beloved Aunt. As with all Smith's novels, there is an early scene where the heroine expresses feelings and beliefs which she will later feel significant, although ambiguous, regret for.

In Novel on Yellow Paper that belief is anti-Semitism, where she feels elation at being the "only Goy" at a Jewish party. This apparently throwaway scene acts as a timebomb, which detonates at the centre of the novel when Pompey visits Germany as the Nazis are gaining power. With horror, she acknowledges the continuity between her feeling "Hurray for being a Goy" at the party and the madness that is overtaking Germany.

The German scenes stand out in the novel, but perhaps equally powerful is her dissection of failed love. She describes two unsuccessful relationships, first with the German Karl and then with the suburban Freddy. The final section of the novel describes with unusual clarity the intense pain of her break-up with Freddy. Over the Frontier Cape, Smith herself dismissed her second novel as a failed experiment, but its attempt to parody popular genre fiction to explore profound political issues now seems to anticipate post-modern fiction.

In particular, she asks how the necessity of fighting Fascism can be achieved without descending into the nationalism and dehumanisation that fascism represents. After a failed romance the heroine, Pompey, suffers a breakdown and is sent to Germany to recuperate.

Biography stevie smith

Caz is on leave from Palestine and is deeply disillusioned, Tom goes mad during the war, and it is telling that the family scandal that blights Celia and Caz's lives took place in India. Just as Pompey's anti-Semitism is tested in Novel on Yellow Paperso Celia's traditional nationalism and sentimental support for colonialism are challenged throughout The Holiday.

Soon her poems were found in periodicals. Her style was often very dark; her characters were perpetually saying "goodbye" to their friends or welcoming death. At the same time her work has an eerie levity and can be very funny though it is neither light nor whimsical. She was never sentimental, undercutting any pathetic effects with the ruthless honesty of her humour.

Smith said she got the phrase from parish magazines, where biographies stevie smith of church picnics often included this phrase. Variations appear in pop culture, including " Being for the Benefit of Mr. Though her poems were remarkably consistent in tone and quality throughout her life, their subject matter changed over time, with less of the outrageous wit of her youth and more reflection on suffering, faith and the end of life.

Her best-known poem is " Not Waving but Drowning ". As an occasional work, Smith wrote the text of the coffee-table book Cats in Colourfor which she wrote a humorous series of captions to photographs imagining the inner lives of cats. Smith's poems have been the focus of writers and critics around the world. Innewly declassified UK government files revealed that Smith was considered as a candidate to be the new Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in following the death of John Masefield.

She was rejected after appointments secretary John Hewitt consulted with Dame Helen Gardnerthe Merton Professor of English at the University of Oxford who stated that Smith "wrote 'little girl poetry' about herself mostly" and Geoffrey Handley-Taylor, chair of The Poetry Society who stated that Smith was "unstable". Contents move to sidebar hide.

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Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Stevie Smith has been described as "one of the most musical British poets of the century"; she has also been labeled "an airhead and an egghead" and a misanthrope. In the s, Smith was a literary celebrity, a kind of cult figure among youthful radicals. Conservative, reclusive, and frugal, she endured loneliness and disappointment, labored at her boring job as a secretary for 30 years, and "suffered from her ambivalence toward [religious] faith.

If her private life was prosaic and regimented, her poetry allowed her to soar above the dour reality of her daily existence. Florence Margaret Smith, then known as Peggy, was born in into a middle-class family in Hull, Yorkshire. Her mother Ethel Spear Smith was the daughter of a successful engineer, a "frail romantic," who married the handsome Charles Ward Smith, a man "with a taste for drink and wanderlust.

Inwhen Smith was four years old, Charles abandoned his wife and two daughters and went to sea. Although he and Ethel never divorced, Charles rarely contacted his family and never provided them any financial support. Throughout her life, Stevie Smith resented his "defection" which made her wary of men and their sense of commitment.

Ethel, her sister Margaret Spearand the girls moved from Hull to London; with a small legacy from Ethel's father, they took up residence in the London suburb of Palmers Green. Stevie lived in the house at 1 Avondale Road—what she called "a house of female habitation"—for the rest of her life. In London, Stevie and her sister Molly born in attended private schools.

At age five, Stevie contracted tubercular peritonitis and spent time in a convalescent home. She was an average student; she received a prize for literature in high school but no scholarship for a university education. Molly graduated from the university and became a teacher, while Stevie took a six-month secretarial course in London. Smith's lack of academic achievement was a source of shame which she tried to remedy by becoming a voracious reader.

She devoured the classics and read D. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Oscar WildeVirginia Woolfand French criticism, but consciously avoided reading contemporary poetry: "one will get the lines crossed and begin writing their poems and they will begin writing one's own," she stated. Stevie would be a writer, a poet, and she would be original, uninfluenced by other modern poets.

The demure female Smith household was religious, members of the Anglican Church. Smith eventually regarded herself as an "Anglican agnostic"; she was not certain God existed, but He "made humankind less lonely in the universe. In FebruaryEthel Smith died; Charles showed up at his wife's funeral, displaying uncharacteristic grief; the next year, he remarried.

His second wife called him "Tootles" which elicited Smith to biography stevie smith, "if he can inspire someone to call him Tootles, there must be things about him I don't see. Stevie's Aunt Margaret became the center of her life, her greatest love on whom she could always depend. Molly was teaching in Suffolk, and when she converted to Roman Catholicism inStevie was disturbed, but it made her give serious consideration to religion which is amply demonstrated in her writing.

While Molly had a university degree and a career, Stevie had to settle for work as a secretary; inshe became private secretary to Sir Neville Pearson, chair of a publishing firm in London. During slack periods in her often undemanding, humdrum work, Smith began writing poems. Having read almost a book a day for years, she had broadened her horizons and her knowledge of literature and style.

However, it would be 11 years before she had anything published, and it would be a novel, not poetry. In the meantime, she toiled at her "demeaning" job, lived with her maiden aunt in the dull London suburb, and dreamed of entering the exalted ranks of the British literary set. Love and men did not figure prominently in Smith's personal life, but she did have two brief, unsatisfactory love affairs before rejecting the idea of marriage.

On a trip to Germany inshe met Karl Eckinger, a handsome Swiss-German graduate student whom she had known in London. He was a great admirer of all things German, but Stevie was not, and this led to their break up. In Berlin, she stayed with Jewish friends and was shaken when she saw a swastika painted on their doorpost. The Nazis were already a frightful presence, and Smith began to despise Germany, an attitude she held for the rest of her life.

Stevie has been accused of being anti-Semitic because of remarks that appeared in her Novel on Yellow Paper. She did think Jews "weren't really English" and were "pushy," a view not uncommon in England at the time. A year later, Smith met her second handsome lover, Eric Armitage, with whom she was physically, but not emotionally, compatible.

They became informally engaged, but Eric expected to acquire a conventional wife, a role that a nascent poet could never accept. She came to regard men in general as "tomcats" though she had several male friends during her lifetime.