Stevie Smith

That was the first book that Virago ever published.

Novel on Yellow Notepaper by Stevie Smith, the very iconoclastic English poet Stevie Smith.

And I've been meaning to read this for a long time.

And Peaking Picnic by Anne Bridge, which was just re-released by Dawn, I think, and is having a new life.

Travis Scott, slightly different situation because he, he, as an artist, encourages that kind of mad behavior that, that doesn't fit with the standard crowd, encourages people to rage, you know.

And so when people are shouting in a crowd, you know, it's the Stevie Smith, isn't it? It's not waving, but drowning.

You know-

Mm

But unusually for, for books that we do on this show, people recognized as soon as it came out that it was something quite new and something pretty remarkable.

To quote just a couple of the first reviews from 1954, so the poet Stevie Smith said, "It was a beautiful and desperate book, something quite out of the ordinary." And then the novelist E.M.

Forster, who I love, so that he wrote Howard's End, A Passage to India, for instance.

He named it his book of the year and said it was beautifully written, tragic, and provocative.

Sorry, that's a famous poem.

But what makes your, do you not know that poem with Stevie Smith, Not Waving, Drowning? No, but I'm totally

looking it up.

Look it up, it's