Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Smith, Stevie (Vol. 25) - Lisa Mitchell

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LISA MITCHELL

The uncollected work assembled for "Me Again" is not a case of spinning a deceased artist's old notes to the milkman into timely gold. This collection, though imperfect, holds treasures….

Stevie—nee Florence Margaret—Smith constantly "blurred distinctions between one form of writing and another." She quoted her poems in her stories and essays, transplanted ideas (sometimes word for word across years) from her essays to her book reviews and drew heavily from her own life in almost everything she wrote.

The stories in "Me Again"—and these are all of Stevie Smith's stories—are an uneven lot. The opener, "Beside the Sea," has shining moments but fails in its stilted speech and obvious setups for the Stevie character, a writer named Helen, to talk her beliefs and recite her poems at a friend. "In the Beginning of the War" … is an artful piece of eavesdropping that deliciously re-creates dialogue among some liberals of the period....

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1. Introduction
2. Calvin Bedient
3. Stephen Tapscott
4. Mark Storey
5. Michael Schmidt
6. John Bayley
7. Victoria Glendinning
8. Penelope Fitzgerald
9. Carole Angier
10. Lisa Mitchell
11. Quentin Crisp
12. Joyce Carol Oates
13. Copyright

1. Joyce Carol Oates