Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Smith, Stevie (Vol. 25) - Victoria Glendinning

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VICTORIA GLENDINNING

She once ended a letter with 'lots of buoyant love and hollow laughter'—words that set the tone for this volume of Stevie Smith's uncollected writings. It consists of reviews, essays, poems, stories, letters and a radio play. The letters are lively, witty and affectionate; it is they, with the reviews and essays, that are the most worthwhile things in [Me Again: Uncollected Writings].

There is perhaps a little too much space given to her evocations of Palmer's Green, the North London suburb where she spent virtually her whole life and which she loved to describe. But on life within the house she is original and celebratory in her own throw-away, ironic manner. (p. 660)

[The] poems collected up here will not detract from, but will not add anything to, her reputation. So often she expected the heavy traffic of her own thoughts on the Deity, Nature, herself, to fit into a context as twee as the pram to which she whimsically,...

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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