‘Confident and very readable . . . one of Frances Spalding’s achievements in this book is to display Stevie Smith’s frailties without destroying her dignity’ – Victoria Glendinning, Literary Review

‘A careful, informative and worthwhile book’ – Hermione Lee, The Observer

‘It is a biography of inner life. It is also a hymn to tenebrous suburbia, a book full of English oddness, and a lovely loamish read.’ – The Times

Stevie Smith had a unique literary voice: her idiosyncratic, wonderfully funny and poignant poems established her as one of the most individual of English modern poets. She claimed her own life was ‘precious dull’, but Frances Spalding’s acclaimed biography reveals a far from conventional woman.

While she lived in suburbia with her beloved ‘Lion Aunt’, Stevie Smith was from the early 1930s a vibrant figure on London’s intellectual and literary scene, mixing with artists and writers, among them Olivia Manning, Rosamond Lehmann and George Orwell. She was noted for her wit – often maliciously directed at friends – and occasional public tantrums. Her use of real people in her writing angered many of her friends and brought the threat of libel.

Always feeling herself out of step with the world, she was haunted by her father’s absence during her childhood and her mother’s early death; she longed for love yet was sexually ambivalent. In exploring the intimate relationship between Stevie Smith’s life and work, Frances Spalding gives a new insight into a writer who always saw death as a friend, yet was also one of the great celebrators of life, whether commonplace or extraordinary.

‘Confident and very readable . . . one of Frances Spalding’s achievements in this book is to display Stevie Smith’s frailties without destroying her dignity’

‘A careful, informative and worthwhile book.’

‘It is a biography of inner life. It is also a hymn to tenebrous suburbia, a book full of English oddness, and a lovely loamish read.’

FRANCES SPALDING is an art historian, critic and biographer. She read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing pieces for the TLS, The Burlington Magazine and art journals while still a post-graduate. She went on to write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. Between 2000 and 2015, she taught at Newcastle University, becoming Professor of Art History. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was made a CBE for Services to Literature.