Facades: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell

John Pearson

Dec 2011 · A&C Black

About this ebook

First published in 1978 Façades details the lives of three of the twentieth century's most intriguing literary figures: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. Aristocrats emanating from a privileged but loveless youth, they moulded the scene of the English avant-garde throughout the 1920s and in Cyril Connolly's words, 'had they not been there a whole area of life would have been missing.' Picking up protégés and starting feuds with equal alacrity they were never far from controversy and were often slighted for being better known for the façades which they put up around their work rather than their artistic out-put in itself. Whether these façades were set up to hide their art or their deeply conflicted personal lives is one of the most compelling problems brought up by Pearson. With as much attention paid to both the private and public aspects of their lives, this biography captures the manifest intrigue of one of England's strangest and most flamboyant families, and the whole host of fascinating characters from T.S Eliot to Gertrude Stein, with whom their paths intersect.

About the author

John Pearson was born in 1930, and educated at King's College School, Wimbledon and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read history. He has worked on various newspapers, including the Economist, The Times, and The Sunday Times where for a time he wrote the Atticus column.

After the success of his Life of Ian Fleming, he decamped with wife and family to Rome, where he lived for some years. Mr Pearson returned to England to research and write the life and times of the Kray brothers in The Profession of Violence and has since written many more successful works of both fiction and non-fiction. Biographies remain his specialty with accomplished studies of the Sitwells, Winston Churchill and the Royal Family following his earlier successes.