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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Stevie Smith
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(Florence Margaret Smith, 1902–71)
Poet and novelist, known for a barbed wit masking an often bleak view of life. She had the same job for her entire professional career – as a private secretary in the publishing firm of Newnes – and she lived in the house of an adored aunt (the 'lion aunt') who died in 1966. In her last decade Stevie Smith had considerable success on the poetry-reading circuit of the 1960s. Glenda Jackson played her in Stevie (1977), a play and then a film based on her life and work. She has added to everyday English idiom a phrase, 'not waving but drowning', which was the title of one of her books (1957). The title poem includes the couplet: I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
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