Stevie Smith

Stevie Smith (1902-1971) was for many years regarded as England's endearing 'eccentric', an identification which effectively dehistoricised her very funny, if often chilling, poems and prose. The subject of two entertaining biographies, the extraordinary woman rather than the extraordinary work was for far too many years the focus of readers and critics alike. But the 1990s saw a new burst of strikingly different assessments of Smith's contribution to literary modernism, much of it put forward by women's studies scholars engaged in rewriting the (his)tory of centres versus 'ex-centric' peropheries in the modern critical tradition. Though invaluable, these rewritings have, ironically, by virtue of their exclusive interest in women's issues and gendered reading continued to isolate Smith from the broader discursive context that she so desperately knew herself to be shaped by, even as she plunged into self-implicating critique of what she regarded as its most sinister mid-century developments. Romana Huk pursues that critique by offering a new model for approaching the work of this key modernist, resulting in exciting new readings of the long-neglected novels in particular, as well as the better-known and loved poems and stories.