Detailing hundreds of the poet’s acquaintances and why they irked or charmed her, its entries are busy with names from Gore Vidal to Elizabeth Arden and the Queen Mother
Edith Sitwell was known for her scathing assessments of her contemporaries as much as for her poetry, famously dismissing FR Leavis a “tiresome, whining, pettifogging little pipsqueak”, and DH Lawrence as “a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden”. Now her address book, which was found among family ephemera at Weston Hall in Northamptonshire, reveals her private takes on those who annoyed her, from the “impertinent Catholic ass” to the “psychopath who insulted me after television”.
Sitwell, born into a family of landed gentry, was the eldest of three siblings who all became celebrated writers. She and her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell formed a kind of literary clique that some viewed as a rival to the Bloomsbury set. Her books include The Mother and Other Poems (1915) and Façade, which were set to music by her protege William Walton.
