Word: renishaw
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Cecil Beaton, for whose camera she seemed to have been invented, described her as "a tall, graceful scarecrow with the hands of a mediaeval saint." She appeared to have sprung fully formed from the battlements and spires of her childhood home, Renishaw Hall, like a figure in a tapestry...
...genius for attracting important people to her crusade. For 18 years the elegantly impoverished daughter of Renishaw lived in unfashionable Bayswater. Her literary teas Evelyn Waugh summed up tersely as "stale buns and no chairs." Yet what names eagerly scrambled up the dingy stairs to knock on her "nasty green door." T.S. Eliot, Ravel, Diaghilev, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats were among the Olympians one might have met at the Sitwells' salons...
Kings' Blood. Dame Edith was forever conscious that in her veins ran the blood of Robert Bruce and Macbeth, the Kings of France and the Plantagenets of England. Her family had held land near their pinnacled greystone house of Renishaw since 1301. She had a miserable childhood, for her Victorian father disapproved of everything, from her friendship with a peacock to the shape of her nose, which he tried to alter with an iron clamp...
Edith was only five when she attempted to run away from home, but returned because she couldn't lace her boots. At Renishaw, the Sitwell country house in Derbyshire, the child's first friend was a peacock which used to wait for her each morning. "I would go to the garden and we would walk, you might say, arm in arm. When asked why I loved him so, I answered, 'Because he's beautiful, and be cause he wears a crown!' " That idyll ended when father Sitwell bought the peacock a wife. "From that moment...
Martinis & Murder. Today Dame Edith faces the world in a composite armor of shyness, imperiousness and friendliness. She likes her solitude, and she likes her martinis. At Renishaw, she stays in bed till noon reading and writing as a huge wood fire blazes away. Much as she likes elegance, she is addicted to occasional forays into London's East End, where she often chats with prostitutes and barrow boys. On these excursions, her friends say, she creates for herself an underworld dream life. She also follows murder cases avidly, recently dragged brother Osbert to the scene of the grisly...