Stevie Smith, steel soul of the suburbs

Rachel Cooke reviews the life and career of the singular English poet and novelist, whose first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, is reissued

Stevie Smith: She likened her fiction to the sea: on the surface sunny, but seven miles down ‘black and cold’. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

Rachel Cooke

Monday 6 April 2015 The Guardian

Stevie Smith was the first poet I read. I can’t remember how I discovered her; all I know is that I asked for her Collected Poems one Christmas. If the elaborately careful signature on the inside jacket is anything to judge by, I must have been about 15 at the time. I liked the fact that she was a swift read, her poems so wondrously succinct I sometimes wondered if they really counted as Literature. Far too many writers were, in my youthful opinion, far too prolix. But it was her tone that really delighted me. Her irony, her wit, that slight edge of malice: these things spoke to a moody teenager. Her voice was irresistible.

It was a kind of magic for Rachel Cooke when she first picked up a Virago Modern Classic. Suddenly a whole world of fabulous, neglected women writers - from Stevie Smith to Antonia White - opened up before her. On the eve of the series' 30th anniversary, she traces how the imprint changed the publishing landscape for ever

Wanting more, I bought her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, and one grey Sunday – exactly the kind of dreary, slow-ticking afternoon she must often have endured in her Victorian villa, marooned in the outer reaches of suburban London – I sat down to read it. The shock was considerable. What’s this? I thought, a question that’s tricky to answer even now, for Smith’s novels (she wrote three, after which she abandoned fiction for ever) are nothing if not singular. Her debts – to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, to the Dorothys Parker and Richardson, and, above all, to Virginia Woolf – might well be obvious, especially to those well schooled in modernism. Nevertheless, she remains her own writer, sui generis. A poem, she once told a friend, was a relatively light thing; it could be carried around “while you’re doing the housework”.

More