Stevie Smith: A Biography

by Frances Spalding

Book Overview

This updated edition of the classic biography questions the accepted perception of Stevie Smith as a recluse.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393307182
• ISBN13: 9780393307184
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Gripping; Informative; Balanced; Sane

I think this is the authoritative biography of Stevie Smith. Its attitude towards its subject is respectful without being uncritical. There is some apology towards the beginning of the book that Smith's life was perhaps too uneventful for the purposes of interesting biography. In fact, the account is gripping. Smith, we read here, socialised with names who have become legend (and many who haven't); had brief affairs both hetero- and homosexual; threw tantrums in public, and made an extravagant suicide-attempt with a pair of scissors in the office where she worked. Spalding gives very reliable impressions of the kind of writing Smith produced - poetry, novels and reviews - so that one's sense of the woman's total achievement (unless one is already unusually familiar with it) is well broadened. This is biography of exactly right the tone. It is descriptive and sanely sympathetic with a minimum of polemic and interpretation. One concludes the book, therefore, able to see Stevie Smith as both a profoundly feeling and insightful human whilst also almost certifiably insane. It is also extremely well-researched: one learns a lot of incidental information (about the educational system in England in the 1920s; the London literary scene in the 1940s and 50s; about the Church of England, and so on). It enlarges one's understanding of Stevie Smith without biasing one towards an interpretation of her.