A play, Stevie by Hugh Whitemore, based on her life, was adapted into a film starring Glenda Jackson.

[1][2] She was called "Peggy" within her family, but acquired the name "Stevie" as a young woman when she was riding in the park with a friend who said that she reminded him of the jockey Steve Donoghue.

When Stevie Smith was three years old, she moved with her mother and sister to Palmers Green in North London where she would live until her death in 1971.

[4] When suffering from the depression to which she was subject all her life, Smith was so consoled by the thought of death as a release that, as she put it, she did not have to commit suicide.

[1] She spent the remainder of her life with her aunt, and worked as private secretary to Sir Neville Pearson at Newnes Publishing Company in London from 1923 to 1953.

Despite her secluded life, she corresponded and socialised widely with other writers and creative artists, including Elisabeth Lutyens, Sally Chilver, Inez Holden, Naomi Mitchison, Isobel English and Anna Kallin.

After she retired from Sir Neville Pearson's service following a nervous breakdown, she gave poetry readings and broadcasts on the BBC that gained her new friends and readers among a younger generation.

[5] Smith was described by her friends as being naive and selfish in some ways and formidably intelligent in others, having been raised by her aunt as both a spoiled child and a resolutely autonomous woman.

Smith was celibate for most of her life, although she rejected the idea that she was lonely as a result, alleging that she had a number of intimate relationships with friends and family that kept her fulfilled.

Apart from death, common subjects in her writing include loneliness; myth and legend; absurd vignettes, usually drawn from middle-class British life; war; human cruelty; and religion.

She plays word games, retells stories from classical and popular culture, remembers events from her childhood, gossips about her friends and describes her family, particularly her beloved Aunt.

This apparently throwaway scene acts as a timebomb, which detonates at the centre of the novel when Pompey visits Germany as the Nazis are gaining power.

Most of the characters are employed in the army or the civil service in post-war reconstruction, and its heroine, Celia, works for the Ministry as a cryptographer and propagandist.

Celia and her cousin Caz are in love, but cannot pursue their affair since it is believed that, because of their parents' adultery, they are half-brother and half-sister.

The unsustainability of the British Empire and the uncertainty over Britain's post-war role are constant themes, and many of the characters discuss their personal and political concerns as if they were seamlessly linked.

Just as Pompey's anti-Semitism is tested in Novel on Yellow Paper, so Celia's traditional nationalism and sentimental support for colonialism are challenged throughout The Holiday.

James Antoniou writes in The Australian that her 'apparent innocence masks such fierce complexities, such ambition and startling originality, that many people baulk at her work', while Michael Dirda affirms in The Washington Post that, 'certainly, an outward charm is part of Smith's aesthetic strategy, though there’s nothing naive or whimsical beneath her surface.

'[15] In 2023, newly declassified UK government files revealed that Smith was considered as a candidate to be the new Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1967 following the death of John Masefield.

She was rejected after appointments secretary John Hewitt consulted with Dame Helen Gardner, the Merton Professor of English at the University of Oxford (who stated that Smith "wrote 'little girl poetry' about herself mostly") and Geoffrey Handley-Taylor, chair of The Poetry Society (who stated that Smith was "unstable").