Stevie Smith

Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971), was an English poet and novelist. She won the Cholmondeley Award and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. A play, '' Stevie'' by Hugh Whitemore, based on her life, was adapted into a film starring Glenda Jackson.

Life

Stevie Smith, born Florence Margaret Smith in Kingston upon Hull, was the second daughter of Ethel and Charles Smith.(Couzyn, Jeni 1985) ''Contemporary Women Poets''. Bloodaxe, p. 32. She was called "Peggy" within her family, but acquired the name "Stevie" as a young woman when she was riding in the park with a friend who said that she reminded him of the jockey Steve Donoghue.

Her father was a shipping agent, a business that he had inherited from his father. As the company and his marriage began to fall apart, he ran away to sea and Smith saw very little of him after that.Smith, Florence Margaret (Stevie) (1902–1971)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Retrieved 22 March 2011 He appeared occasionally on 24-hour shore leave and sent very brief postcards ("Off to Valparaiso, Love Daddy").

When Stevie Smith was three years old, she moved with her mother and sister to Palmers Green in North London where she would live until her death in 1971. She resented the fact that her father had abandoned his family. Later, when her mother became ill, her aunt Madge Spear (whom Smith called "The Lion Aunt") came to live with them, raised Smith and her elder sister Molly and became the most important person in Smith's life. Spear was a feminist who claimed to have "no patience" with men and, as Smith wrote, "she also had 'no patience' with Hitler". Smith and Molly, raised in a family of women, became attached to their own independence, in contrast to what Smith described as the typical Victorian family atmosphere of "father knows best".

When Smith was five, she developed tuberculous peritonitis and was sent to a sanatorium near Broadstairs, Kent, where she remained for three years.(Couzyn, Jeni 1985) ''Contemporary Women Poets''. Bloodaxe, p. 33. She related that her preoccupation with death began when she was seven, at a time when she was very distressed at being sent away from her mother. Death and fear fascinated her and provide the subjects of many of her poems.(Couzyn, Jeni 1985) ''Contemporary Women Poets''. Bloodaxe, p. 35. Her mother died when Smith was 16.

When suffering from the depression to which she was subject all her life, Smith was so consoled by the thought of death as a release that, as she put it, she did not have to commit suicide. She wrote in several poems that death was "the only god who must come when he is called". Smith suffered throughout her life from an acute nervousness, described as a mix of shyness and intense sensitivity.

In the poem "A House of Mercy", she wrote of her childhood house in North London:

It was a house of female habitation,
Two ladies fair inhabited the house,
And they were brave. For although Fear knocked loud

Upon the door, and said he must come in,
They did not let him in.

Smith was educated at Palmers Green High School and North London Collegiate School for Girls. She spent the remainder of her life with her aunt, and worked as private secretary to Sir Neville Pearson at Newnes Publishing Company in London from 1923 to 1953. Despite her secluded life, she corresponded and socialised widely with other writers and creative artists, including Elisabeth Lutyens, Sally Chilver, Inez Holden, Naomi Mitchison, Isobel English and Anna Kallin.

After she retired from Sir Neville Pearson's service following a nervous breakdown she gave poetry readings and broadcasts on the BBC
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