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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BRITAIN
 
  More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)

 
More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
Stevie Smith

(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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