[Vwoolf] Virginia Woolf as/and Stevie Smith

Karen Levenback kllevenback at att.net
Wed Sep 20 06:53:27 EDT 2017


According to Garrison Keillor in today's Writer's Almanac (paragraph 3):

Today is the birthday of English poet and novelist Stevie Smith (books by this author), born in East Yorkshire, England (1902). Smith’s birth name was Florence Margaret, and her family called her “Peggy,” but when she was a young woman, a friend said she reminded him of the jockey Steve Donoghue, and she was “Stevie” after that.For most of her life, Smith worked as a secretary in a British publishing house and lived with her aunt, all the while writing and publishing acerbic, witty poems and novels, like Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), narrated by a chatty and sharp young woman named Pompey, who was basically a stand-in for Smith. At one point, Pompey says: “But first, Reader, I will give you a word of warning. This is a foot-off-the-ground novel that came by the left hand. And the thoughts come and go and sometimes they do not quite come and I do not pursue them to embarrass them with formality to pursue them into a harsh captivity. And if you are a foot-off-the-ground person I make no bones to say that is how you will write and only how you will write. And if you are a foot-on-the-ground person, this book will be for you a desert of weariness and exasperation.”The novel took Britain by storm. No one thought an unassuming, rather dull-seeming woman like Smith could have written such a book. The poet Robert Nichols was convinced that Virginia Woolf was ‘‘Stevie Smith’’ and even wrote Woolf an odd six-page letter assuring her that Novel on Yellow Paper was her best by far. Smith loved all the notoriety, but wrote to a friend, ‘‘Very few in this suburb knew me as Stevie Smith, & I should like it to stay that way.”Stevie Smith’s most famous poem is “Not Waving but Drowning,” which was voted Britain’s “second-favorite poem.”In her novel Over the Frontier (1938), Smith wrote, “Power and cruelty are the strengths of our lives, and only in their weakness is there love.”Stevie Smith died of brain tumor in 1971. She once said: “There is no reason to be sad, as some people are sad when they feel religion slipping off from them. There is no reason to be sad, it is a good thing.”With best wishes--Karen Levenback
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