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Let's begin with a trivia question: What English literary family of this century appears as both an adjective and a noun in the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary? Answer: the Sitwells--Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell. Sitwellian and Sitwellism may not be necessary terms in today's critical vocabulary, but in the early days of High Modernism they had considerable currency in journalistic criticism and literary gossip. Collectively the three Sitwells were perceived to embody something uniquely their own, though observers disagreed as to what that something was: A poetic style? A spiteful way of gossiping? A method of self-promotion? A shared paranoia? A self-created legend? It was, in fact, all of these; and the sum of them made the Sitwells, in their day, England's most visible literary family.
The beginning of their visibility can be dated quite precisely. It was 1916, when Edith and Osbert published Twentieth-Century Harlequinade, a book of their poems, and Edith launched her poetry annual, Wheels, which contained poems by all three Sitwells. Edith was 29, Osbert 24, Sacheverell 20. From that time, literary people began to notice them; references to them turn up in the letters and the diaries of Arnold Bennett, Aldous Huxley, Eliot, Sassoon, Virginia Woolf. But the Sitwells weren't taken very seriously. "Their great object is to REBEL," Huxley wrote in 1917, "which sounds quite charming; only one finds that the steps they are prepared to take, the lengths they will go are so small as to be hardly perceptible to the naked eye."
Still, it is surprising that they became literary figures at all. They were minor aristocracy--the children of a baronet and an earl's daughter--and that class has never contributed much to English culture. And their parents were particularly difficult people: Sir George an obstinate autocrat who was pathologically tight with his money, Lady Ida a feckless gambler who nearly bankrupted the family and went to prison in 1915 for fraud. So the three young people who turned up in London determined to be poets arrived with some heavy luggage: too much family, you might say, and not enough cash.
It was difficult being a rebel during the war; indeed, it was almost against the law. But after 1918 it was easier. Those early postwar years...