She never married but became passionately attached to Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was generous and helpful.

[2] Sitwell had two younger brothers, Osbert (1892–1969) and Sacheverell (1897–1988), both distinguished authors, well-known literary figures in their own right, and long-term collaborators.

[2] Her relationship with her parents was stormy at best, not least because her father made her undertake a "cure" for her supposed spinal deformation, involving locking her into an iron frame.

[4] In 1914, 26-year-old Sitwell moved to a small, shabby flat in Pembridge Mansions, Bayswater, which she shared with Helen Rootham (1875–1938), her governess since 1903.

Around 1914, she developed a passion for the Chilean artist and boxer Álvaro de Guevara, whom her biographer Richard Greene describes as "thuggish".

[5] Violent, unstable and addicted to opium, Guevara eventually became involved with the poet and socialite Nancy Cunard, whom Sitwell subsequently "never lost an opportunity to speak ill of".

Sassoon, who was homosexual, cared deeply for Sitwell, but Greene asserts that she fell in love with him, becoming jealous of his lover Stephen Tennant in the late 1920s.

George Orwell, reviewing the book in the New Adelphi, noted Sitwell's fixation on the "texture" of Pope's work, which he argued distracted her from his sometimes hackneyed sentiments, but praised "her warm-hearted defence of the poet against all his detractors".

During the Second World War, Sitwell returned from France and retired to the family home at Renishaw Hall with her brother Osbert and his lover, David Horner.

Poems from The Canticle of the Rose were set by composer Joseph Phibbs in a song-cycle for high soprano with string quartet premiered in 2005.

In 1948 Sitwell toured the United States with her brothers, reciting her poetry and, notoriously, giving a reading of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene.

She always claimed that she wrote prose simply for money and both these books were extremely successful, as were her English Eccentrics (1933) and Victoria of England [sic] (1936).

Sitwell was the subject of This Is Your Life in November 1962, when she was surprised by Eamonn Andrews on the stage of the BBC Television Theatre in London.

From 1961 until shortly before her death, Sitwell lived in a flat in Hampstead in London, which is now marked with an English Heritage blue plaque.

She became a proponent and supporter of innovative trends in English poetry and opposed what she considered the conventionality of many contemporary backward-looking poets.

Her flat became a meeting place for young writers whom she wished to befriend and help: these later included Dylan Thomas and Denton Welch.

Her unusual appearance provoked critics almost as much as her verse, and she was the subject of virulent personal attacks from Geoffrey Grigson, F. R. Leavis, and others.

Critic Julian Symons attacked Sitwell in The London Magazine of November 1964, accusing her of "wearing other people's bleeding hearts on her own safe sleeve.