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, horrifically, longs to return in a poem called 'Surrounded by Children'. Writing in prose, she was prepared to push prams over cliffs. In the essay 'My Muse' she wrote: 'All the poems Poetry writes may be called "Heaven, a detail", or "Hell, a detail".' (She only writes about heaven and hell.) In a story 'Sunday at Home', the Stevie-figure says repeatedly that 'Hell is a continuation of policy'—which strikes an oddly topical note. Heaven and hell absorbed her. She said she was a 'religious-minded agnostic', and some of the simplest, sharpest prose writing here is about Christianity, which fascinated her and in which she could never quite believe.

She was a tightrope-walker in religion as in everything else. She seemed to walk a tightrope between life and death, flirting with both, but committing herself to neither. (pp. 660-61)

Another perpetual tightrope was that of personal relationships. There are no revelations about her private life in this volume…. But that she knew the pains of love is evident from all she wrote….

The stuff of life and the stuff of death, 'her rhymes, her wit, her obsessions', as her editors say, are loud in this collection. Only Queen Victoria among Englishwomen has ever had such a personal, emphatic, epistolary or pseudo-epistolary style. In 1971 Stevie Smith died from a brain tumour. In the preceding months she lost control over the shape and meaning of words, but even in this disintegration she had grace and a sort of unearthly wit. (p. 661)