Because of the play and film Stevie, many people know a bit about the poet and novelist Stevie Smith. Me Again is a good and welcome book, telling us more. Not much more, because Stevie Smith, though she wrote so clearly out of her own life, never gave much of herself away. But here are her stories and essays, her previously uncollected poems, and a few letters, all in her particular, sharpish voice, full of her particular wit and her particular loneliness….

Several of the short stories in Me Again—and they are very good, perhaps the best things in it—are classics of the visitor's point of view. Here are quarrelling, loving couples, and marvellous monstrous children; the visitor half envies and half mocks, and is glad in the end she isn't them. She loves life, but she is afraid of it; she hugs to herself the...