Edith sitwell

Sacheverell sitwell
English man of letters who became famous, with his sister Edith and brother Sacheverell, as a tilter at establishment windmills in literature and the arts.
A wonderfully witty, major new biography of the renowned poet, novelist, essayist and legendary twentieth-century eccentric.

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Osbert Sitwell was one of the trio of English literary siblings usually referred to as “The Sitwells”. His sister Edith was also a poet while younger brother Sacheverell plied his trade as an art and music critic. All three escaped the aristocratic and sometimes suffocating environment created by their parents who, it is claimed, did nothing to create a loving family environment. Osbert was later in life knighted and inherited the family baronetcy, becoming 5^th Baronet on the death of his father in 1943. He began writing poetry while serving as an Army officer on the Belgian First World War battlefields of Ypres.

He was born Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell on the 6^th December 1892 in London. The family had homes at Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire and in the Yorkshire coastal town of Scarborough. He was sent first to Ludgrove School and then Eton College but his three years at Eton were clearly not to his liking. His “Who’s Who” entry jokingly read “educated during the holidays from Eton”. With war in Europe looming he joined a cavalry regiment in 1911 but soon switched to the

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Osbert Sitwell

Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell (1892-1969), fifth baronet, came from a talented family: Cevasco estimates that he and his two siblings, Edith Sitwell and Sacheverell Sitwell (in this photograph Osbert is on the left and Sacheverell on the right) “produced almost 200 volumes of poetry, fiction, biography, music, art, and literary criticism, giving expression to their own kind of modernism, an amalgam of cubism, futurism, and dadaism best described as ‘Sitwellism’.” Osbert himself wrote a certain amount of science fiction and fantasy, as the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes. “Triple Fugue” (a novella published in a collection of the same name, 1924) imagines a future 1948 world which has Trotsky as Russian President and greatly extended lifespans for the rich. The Man Who Lost Himself (1929) is the fictional biography of a man who died in the second half of the twentieth century. Miracle on Sinai (1933) tells how God deposits new Tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai, causing much debate and, eventually, a war. There are other ite

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Sir Osbert Sitwell (also Francis Osbert Sacheverell)

London, 1892–Castello di Montegufoni, Italy, 1969

Best known as a writer, Osbert Sitwell also became a patron of the arts and a collector after the First World War along with his siblings Edith and Sacheverell. He established himself as a nonconformist intellectual and champion of modernism in literature, the visual arts, and music.

The child of Sir George Sitwell, an eccentric baronet, and Lady Ida Emily Augusta Sitwell, he grew up at the family ancestral house in Renishaw, Derbyshire and from 1909 at the Montegufoni Castle in Tuscany. Sitwell studied at Eton and, eager to escape his conservative upbringing, started circulating in London society before World War I. While in London, he began attending Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. During the war, he was mobilized and sent to the front in France. In 1916, back in London, Sitwell moved into a townhouse in Chelsea with his father’s financial support; his brother eventually moved in. Following extended travels in Europe, the brothers organized the important Exhibition of