Stevie Smith: A Selection: edited by Hermione Lee

Description

This comprehensive and welcoming edition draws on the whole of Stevie Smith's output in poetry, prose and drawings from Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) to Scorpion and Other Poems (1972). Hermione Lee's introduction and arrangement bring out the connections between Stevie Smith's different writings, and show us what an extraordinary and original writer she was. The selection is complemented by biographical and textual notes, and forms an attractive introduction to the work of an idiosyncratic English genius.

Stevie Smith (1902-71) lived in Palmers Green, London, and for much of her life worked as a secretary for the magazine publishers Sir George Newnes and Sir Neville Pearson. Her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, appeared in 1936, and her final collection of poems, Scorpion, was published posthumously in 1972. In 1966 she received a Cholmondeley Award and in 1969 was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Biographer and critic Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. In 2003 she was made a CBE and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.

A poet who deserves a place, among her follow modernists, as one of the best, silly-serious, funny-sad, mock mock-heroic poets of our time.' TLS