‘Gothic enough to hang bells in’ was, apparently, the response of one American visitor to a portrait of Edith Sitwell in the Tate. Elizabeth Bowen, herself an imposing physical presence, described Sitwell in real life as like ‘a high altar on the move’, and Virginia Woolf, on first encountering her in 1918, noted that she was ‘a very tall young woman, wearing a permanently startled expression, and curiously finished off with a high green silk headdress, concealing her hair, so that it is not known whether she has any’. The style, perfected over decades, was part performance, part optical illusion. Sitwell’s passport recorded her height as five feet eleven but she was often reported as being well over six feet. The sharply faceted features, set off by angular drapery and semi-precious stones like a great Vorticist doll, were designed to deflect the eye as much as they attracted it.

LRB 20 October 2011 | PDF Download