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...EDITH SITWELL by Victoria Glendinning; Knopf; 393 pages...
Critic F.R. Leavis once remarked, "The Sitwells belong to the history of publicity, rather than that of poetry." He was accurate, but incomplete: to be a Sitwell was also to elevate self-dramatization to the state of an art. Edith Sitwell made the case for herself and her younger brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, with no trace of corrupting modesty: "We all have the remote air of a legend...
...Biographer Victoria Glendinning, Edith was her own most inspired poem, and she once described herself in a cascade of fanciful imagery: "Tides ran in her blood, her nature was tempestuous...
...slim body and her sudden silences, she might, indeed, have seemed one of the dark and mournful shadows that haunted the house, one of its presages of doom ..." The Sitwell mystique centered on her extraordinary physical presence. Six feet tall, with the beaky, piercing look of a falcon, Edith would have appeared a freak if she had tried to resemble ordinary human beings. Instead she turned herself into something marvelously Gothic. She wore cowled headpieces, gold brocade robes, huge jet and ivory rings, and stared the world down with Byzantine eyes...
...Edith saw herself as a self-appointed champion of the arts against the hordes of barbarians...