Weekly Westminster Gazette 166
Weeks, Edward 348, 381, 418
Weir Mitchell, Dr S. 51
Welch, David 294
Welch, Denton 296, 350; Brave and Cruel, and Other Stories 350; Maiden Voyage 294
Weldon, George 374
Wellesley, Dorothy 295–6
Wellesley College 339
Wells, H. G. 17, 335
Wescott, Glenway 191, 348, 352, 365–6
West, Paul 330–1
West, Rebecca 282–3
West Palm Beach 368
Weston, Connecticut 271
Weston Hall 173, 226, 264, 270–1, 277, 278
Wheeler, Monroe 345, 350, 353, 441
Wheels anthology: first cycle 114–15; Guevara’s contributions 117; second cycle 119–20; fourth cycle 129–30; fifth cycle 139, 145–6; sixth cycle 158, 164; demise of 158
Whistler, James McNeill 68, 71
White, Maude Valérie 70
Whitman, Walt 275–6, 311, 319
Whitney, Betsey 356, 405–6
Whyte, Lancelot Law 354, 390; The Unitary Principle in Physics and Biology 354
Wiel, Evelyn (née Rootham) 48–9, 89, 197, 262–3, 266, 268, 277, 280, 287, 293–4, 310, 314, 324–5, 332, 359, 363, 375–6, 389–90, 400–1, 407, 421–2, 425, 440
Wiel, Truels 49, 197
Wigmore Hall 328
Wilde, Oscar 428
Wilkins, Dicky 287
Willem Ruys (ship) 439
William Foyle Poetry Prize 414
Williams, Mrs Hwfa 180
Williams, Oscar 382
Williams, William Carlos 368
Williamson, Malcolm 441
Wilson, John Philip 85
Wimborne, Alice 182
Wimsatt, W. K. 420
Winchester historical pageant 62
Wolfe, Humbert 181
Wolfenden Report (1957) 416
Wood End 22, 23, 46
Wooden Pegasus, The (E. Sitwell) 148–50
Woodend Creative Workspace 23
Woodhouse, Violet Gordon 70, 230, 291
Woods, Sister Edith 15, 90, 215
Woog, Olga and Bernard 292–3, 298, 300–1
Woolf, John 436
Woolf, Leonard 283
working classes, family attitude to 28
Worth, Irene 436
Wyndham, Richard 177, 212
Yale University 372
Yeats, Georgie 336–7
Yeats, William Butler 67, 75, 113, 195, 213, 235, 268, 288, 309, 336–7; Oxford Book of Modern Verse (ed.) 256
Zaharoff, Basil 122
Ziegler, Philip 107, 432
Zoete, Beryl de 202, 371–2, 407
Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell in early childhood.
Renishaw Hall, the ancestral home of the Sitwells in Derbyshire. Edith’s father, Sir George Sitwell, made the design of its landscape his life’s work.
Lady Ida and Sir George Sitwell: ‘… they were a pair, and the trail of what they have done is still all over everything’.
A curious masterpiece, Sir George Sitwell’s short book On the Making of Gardens (1909) was based on his studies of two hundred Italian gardens.
Osbert, Sacheverell, and Edith, with their beloved nurse Eliza Davis (c.1898).
Wood End in Scarborough, Edith Sitwell’s birthplace, and her home through most of her early life. It is said to be haunted by the ghost of Lady Ida.
John Singer Sargent’s painting of the Sitwell family (1900): ‘I was white with fury and contempt, and indignant that my father held me in what he thought was a tender paternal embrace.’
Edith Sitwell (centre) at art lessons in Scarborough – her dog can be seen on the mat beside her.
‘Delightful but deleterious trio’: Osbert, Sacheverell, and Edith Sitwell in 1924.
‘People like me who are sex-mad have absolutely no obligation to their lovers.’ The Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew was hardly sane, but Sitwell loved him. Here they are in Toulon in 1931.
Façade at the New Chenil Galleries in 1926. From left, Osbert, Edith, and Sacheverell Sitwell, composer William Walton, and actor Neil Porter. Porter is holding a Sengerphone, a type of megaphone, through which he recited the poems.
The ‘party to end all parties’ at the Gotham Book Store, 19 November 1948, in honour of the Sitwells’ arrival in New York: Edith and Osbert in the centre, and at their feet is Charles Henri Ford. Seated at the left is William Rose Benet; behind him Stephen Spender; against the left bookshelves are Horace Gregory and his wife Marya Zaturenska. At the back of the picture are, from left, Tennessee Williams, Richard Eberhart, Gore Vidal, and José Garcia Villa; perched on a ladder, W. H. Auden; seated to Edith’s left is Marianne Moore, with Elizabeth Bishop standing next to her; also on the right side Randall Jarrell is leaning his head back, with Delmore Schwartz in the foreground.
Sitwell meets Marilyn Monroe in Hollywood in January 1953: ‘her face was … strangely, prophetically, tragic, like the face of a beautiful ghost …’
Eyes that do not meet: Edith, Sacheverell, and Osbert Sitwell photographed by ‘Baron’, c.1937. By this time the brothers were becoming estranged.
Sitwell trusted Siegfried Sassoon to criticise her new poetry in the 1920s and 1930s: ‘you are the only person who has ever done anything at all for my poetry’.
A boozing, brawling South African poet, Roy Campbell became Sitwell’s godfather when she entered the Catholic Church in 1955.
Dylan Thomas: Sitwell was his first great promoter and called him her ‘spiritual son’.
Stephen Spender believed Sitwell a brilliant and original poet, and he became a close friend from 1942. He is seen here in a portrait by Robert Buhler (1939).
The painter Walter Sickert befriended Sitwell c.1906. They shared an interest in serial killers.
Virginia Woolf was a close friend, but Sitwell gradually lost interest in her work and dubbed her ‘a beautiful little knitter’.
‘Come to Rapallo, and my wife and I will Lay Hands Upon You’: Sitwell thought Yeats the greatest of modern poets, but found his religious ideas bizarre.
Gertrude Stein: ‘… her figure looks like that of a German hausfrau, or perhaps a head-mistress; but she has a superb face, with sensitive modelling. And she seems full of rich, earthy, Schumannesque life …’
Marianne Moore believed that Sitwell’s war poetry spoke ‘as a living being might, and you are penetrated with the meaning – as if Yeats’ golden bird of Byzance suddenly actually sang, stood in the middle of his poem and sang’.
Edith Sitwell wrote her best poetry at Renishaw Hall during the Second World War. Here she sits in the chilly drawing room in 1945.
Sitwell stopped sitting for Wyndham Lewis when he made a pass at her, so her famous portrait (1923–35) has no hands. He took revenge on her in his roman-à-clef, The Apes of God (1930), which portrayed her as a lesbian.
The genial but absentminded Roger Fry was one of Sitwell’s early friends among the Bloomsbury circle. He painted this portrait of her in 1918.
From the 1920s Edith Sitwell adopted ‘gothic’ dress. In this 1927 portrait by C. R. W. Nevinson, she wears a veiled hat resembling a wimple.
An Australian painter living in France, Stella Bowen became a close friend of both Sitwell and Tchelitchew, executing this portrait of Sitwell between 1927 and 1929.
Tchelitchew’s pastel of Sitwell (1935) was lost in Paris for almost thirty years. After it had been recovered and exhibited in 1964, the dying Sitwell had it hung opposite her bed, where she could see it at all times.
Sitwell’s ‘Aztec’ collar, designed by Millicent Rogers, often clanked as she moved.
A photograph from Sitwell’s last session with Cecil Beaton in 1962. Note the rings: Sitwell had a passion for amethysts, aquamarines and amber.
Edith Sitwell was Cecil Beaton’s favourite subject. In 1927 he photographed her as a regal corpse, lai
d out under a spray of lilies.