Edith Sitwell

Her looks attracted Cecil Beaton and the principal painters of the day. Among her friends were Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. She rebuffed Wyndham Lewis and ardently loved the temperamental Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. The 1930s she spent in penury, writing fiction, biography and verse. Only when Yeats hailed her as 'a major poet' did her work reach a wider audience, whereupon Edith Sitwell set off to conquer New York and Hollywood.

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and...