Stevie Smith earned two seperate and distinct reputations in her lifetime: first as the young, avant-garde novelist of the 1930s who wrote in stream-of-conciousness fashion with the feminist sensibility of Virginia Woolf; and then, over 20 years later, as the laconic, piquant, fiercely honest poet of the 1960s. She was awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1969, and the feminist movement has come to hail her as a harbinger of the expression of modern women's disaffection with the gender values and practices of the West. This volume brings together for the first time the most trechant commentary on Stevie Smith's life and work by some of the finest British and American writers and critics, including Joyce Carol Oates, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Terry Eagleton, Muriel Spark, Christopher Ricks, and Mary Gordon. These illuminating essays, together with an introduction by Sanford Sternlicht, tell much about Stevie Smith's life, the sources of her inspiration, her poetry and fiction, and her place in 20th century British literature.