It would be easy to regard the Sitwells as the next Bloomsbury or Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – a conveniently distanced and enclosed group, prey to an army of biographers and publicists and memoirists, mythologised and fictionalised out of all recognition, turned into a kind of middle-brow ‘Archers’, while their actual works are allowed to fade into obscurity. Such myths are an excuse for not actually reading literature – it is easier to explore the scandals and anecdotes, the secondary material such as letters and diaries, than to confront the literary work and the demands it makes upon the intelligence.

Hot on the heels of John Pearson’s much-publicised group-biography comes a picture-book by Elizabeth Salter, an Australian lady who was Edith Sitwell’s secretary for the last 14 years of her (Edith’s) life, and subsequently published a memoir, Last Years of a Rebel. The present book has an introduction which begins as biography and ends as reminiscence, and takes so uncritically laudatory a view of its subject that one must retract the opinion that no-one can surely take Edith Sitwell seriously any more. The introduction has little to recommend it – it feeds a dead myth, that of the High Priestess, the