"Sitwell described her childhood as "extremely unhappy" and said her mother had "terrible rages" while she rarely saw her father.
Her relationship with her parents was stormy at best, not least because her father made her undertake a "cure" for her supposed spinal deformation, involving locking her into an iron frame"
"Whilst in Scarborough the Sitwell family lived in Wood End, a marine villa
bought by Lady Louisa Sitwell in 1879 to which she added
a double height conservatory filled with tropical plants and birds"
"Around 1914, she developed a passion for the Chilean artist and boxer Álvaro de Guevara, whom her biographer Richard Greene describes as "thuggish".
Violent, unstable and addicted to opium, Guevara eventually became involved with the poet and socialite Nancy Cunard, whom Sitwell subsequently "never lost an opportunity to speak ill of".
"The poems she wrote during the war brought her back before the public. They include Street Songs (1942), The Song of the Cold (1945), and The Shadow of Cain (1947), all of which were much praised.
"Still Falls the Rain", about the London Blitz, remains perhaps her best-known poem; it was set to music by Benjamin Britten as Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain. "
'Edith preferred Chanel No. 5 to having her nose "nailed to other people's lavatories"
"Critic Julian Symons attacked Sitwell in The London Magazine of November 1964, accusing her of
"wearing other people's bleeding hearts on her own safe sleeve."
"Edith Louisa Sitwell was born in Scarborough, North Riding of Yorkshire, the oldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall; he was an expert on genealogy and landscaping.
Her mother was Lady Ida Emily Augusta (née Denison), a daughter of William Denison, 1st Earl of Londesborough and a granddaughter of Henry Somerset, 7th Duke of Beaufort through whom she was descended from the Plantagenets in the female line."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Sitwell
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