Taken Care Of: An Autobiography
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: No dust jacket. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
Few literary figures of the twentieth century cut as singular and defiant a figure as Dame Edith Sitwell — poet, provocateur, and grande dame of British letters — and Taken Care Of stands as her final, extraordinary act of self-creation. Published posthumously in 1965, this autobiography chronicles a life lived entirely on its own terms, from a profoundly unhappy aristocratic childhood in the crumbling grandeur of Renishaw Hall to the glittering, combative heights of London's modernist literary scene. With razor-sharp wit and an imperious eye, Sitwell presents intimate portraits of the great artistic minds she encountered — Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Tchelitchew, and Gertrude Stein among them — while settling old scores with characteristic, unapologetic flair. Written in the same ornate and idiosyncratic prose that defined her poetry, the memoir argues implicitly that eccentricity is not a flaw but a form of armour, a shield forged against a world that rarely understood her. Sitwell's voice — by turns tender, caustic, and luminous — illuminates the cultural battlegrounds of early-to-mid twentieth-century England with the authority of one who helped shape them. For readers of literary biography and modernist history alike, Taken Care Of is an irreplaceable document: a portrait of an artist who refused, to the very end, to be anything other than herself.
Author: Edith Sitwell
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Condition: Good to fair. Jacket: No dust jacket. Page Condition: Good - possible tanning. Markings: possible previous owner inscription.
Few literary figures of the twentieth century cut as singular and defiant a figure as Dame Edith Sitwell — poet, provocateur, and grande dame of British letters — and Taken Care Of stands as her final, extraordinary act of self-creation. Published posthumously in 1965, this autobiography chronicles a life lived entirely on its own terms, from a profoundly unhappy aristocratic childhood in the crumbling grandeur of Renishaw Hall to the glittering, combative heights of London's modernist literary scene. With razor-sharp wit and an imperious eye, Sitwell presents intimate portraits of the great artistic minds she encountered — Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Tchelitchew, and Gertrude Stein among them — while settling old scores with characteristic, unapologetic flair. Written in the same ornate and idiosyncratic prose that defined her poetry, the memoir argues implicitly that eccentricity is not a flaw but a form of armour, a shield forged against a world that rarely understood her. Sitwell's voice — by turns tender, caustic, and luminous — illuminates the cultural battlegrounds of early-to-mid twentieth-century England with the authority of one who helped shape them. For readers of literary biography and modernist history alike, Taken Care Of is an irreplaceable document: a portrait of an artist who refused, to the very end, to be anything other than herself.