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During her long career, Edith Sitwell wrote thousands of letters to a huge variety of correspondents, only a small fraction of which have been published.(1) It is surprising that so few of her letters have appeared in print as she was an accomplished letter writer as fully engaged in the London literary world as anyone writing during the twenties and thirties. She knew nearly everyone in literary and artistic circles and her long roster of friends and enemies kept her amply supplied both with correspondents and subjects. Edith Sitwell's half of the correspondence with Siegfried Sassoon, housed in Washington State University's Holland Library, includes 104 letters written between 1921 and 1957, although most belong to the period of 1926 to 1935.(2) The letters, which include five autograph poems, a few of which are unpublished, offer an interesting record of a curious literary friendship between the most prominent female poet of her day and one of the leading poets of World War I, a friendship that has received relatively slight notice from Sitwell's biographers. Many of Sitwell's and Sassoon's friends and enemies figure in the letters, including Cecil Beaton, Noel Coward, Roy Campbell, John Drinkwater, T. S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Wyndham Lewis, F. R. Leavis, Wilfred Owen, Laura Riding, Gertrude Stein, W. J. Turner, and W. B. Yeats, to name just a few. The letters are full of entertaining literary gossip and open a new window on literary life in the London of the twenties and thirties. That many of Sassoon's friends were Sitwell's enemies accounts in part for the tension in several of the letters, and contributed to the sometimes precarious nature of their friendship. In addition to their importance for the new light they shed on Sitwell's friendship with Sassoon, the letters offer a fuller perspective on Edith Sitwell as a writer of letters than is available in the Selected Letters edited by John Lehmann and Derek Parker, in part because they represent a sustained correspondence with the same person, and also because, writing as she was to a fellow poet, she was encourage d to reveal a side of herself less accessible to those with whom she did not share the craft of poetry.
On reading Sitwell's letters to Sassoon, one is struck...