EDITH SITWELL

Each night, eleven-year-old Edith Sitwell’s legs were enclosed in a steel brace. Her governess kept the keys… “Before she went down to dinner every night, she would lock up my feet,” recalled Sitwell. The girl couldn’t leave her bed, even if the house were on fire. Edith had been diagnosed with a curvature of the spine and weak ankles. When she wasn’t in bed, she was enclosed in an orthopaedic back brace to correct her posture. She called it her prison of iron, her ‘Bastille’.

Edith grew up in Renishaw Hall, a beautiful country house in Derbyshire, England. Her father Sir George loathed her appearance, and insisted she wear a steel truss on her face, a device meant to turn her nose, “firmly to the opposite way which nature had intended”. While her father was trying to reshape his daughter, her mother took her violent rages out on her. Lady