Few reputations have been eclipsed more completely than that of Edith Sitwell, who used to be called "the greatest woman poet since Sappho" but is now little more than a period footnote. She remains interesting on a biographical level, however, and she knew or at least met virtually every English writer or intellectual of her time, and a great many foreign ones as well. Her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, Cecil Beaton, T.S. Eliot, "H.D.", Gertrude Stein, Benjamin Britten, John Gielgud are among the people she addresses, and there is one effusive - in fact, almost sycophantic - letter to W.B. Yeats thanking him for including her in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Edith was a literary politician, an "operator" in the modern sense, and her literary enemies were numerous and detested.
Though the social and literary context of many of these letters have dated, the volume as a whole is valuable as a slice of cultural history, and Edith's prose style is a good deal more entertaining than her verse.