SOURCE: "Stevie Smith," in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Poets: Eleven British Writers, edited by Jeni Couzyn, Bloodaxe Books, 1985, pp. 33-40.

Couzyn is a South African poet and dramatist. In the following essay, she addresses autobiographical aspects of Smith's poetry.

Of the house in North London where she lived from her fourth birthday until her death at sixty-eight, Stevie Smith has written:

 It was a house of female habitation,
Two ladies fair inhabited the house,
And they were brave. For although Fear knocked loud
Upon the door, and said he must come in,
They did not let him in.
('A House of Mercy') 

Her father was in the shipping business, and when the family firm collapsed under his mismanagement of it, he ran away to sea, leaving his wife to cope with their two small daughters. Both children were seriously ill throughout early childhood (Stevie Smith spent three...