Black swan

At a time when publishers seem chary of commissioning literary biographies, the conditions for writing them have never been better. Major authors born in the 1890s and early 1900s were written about pretty comprehensively in the so-called golden age of biography, stretching from the last quarter of the past century into the first few years of the present one. Now they are up for reassessment. ‘It is time to look again at Edith Sitwell,’ as Richard Greene puts it.

The advantage for the new wave is that more material has become available. In the case of Edith Sitwell, biographies of her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell have filled some gaps. Letters that were stuffed in drawers at Renishaw are now put in order. The embargo has been lifted on her correspondence with the man she loved in vain, the artist Pavel Tchelitchew. The research notes of earlier biographers have found their way into university libraries.