My great aunt Edith Sitwell's clothes were her armour – but they were my playthings

It was one of the final paintings to be hung on the wall of our new house in Somerset. For years it had lived, clustered by other drawings and oils, in the lobby, a first-floor room in our old family home, Weston Hall in Northamptonshire.

We had made the brutal decision to sell the place, which had been in our family since 1714. With it now sold, contents packed and shipped to new homes and the storerooms of auction houses, I was enjoying the catharsis that came with placing much-loved chattels – furniture, paintings, trinkets and books – in a new abode.

I carefully removed the bubble wrap and held the painting aloft. Its new position would be in our terracotta-coloured dining room; with no competing art around it, it would sparkle.

The picture is of Dame Edith Sitwell, painted in profile, her hair a little lank, her skin porcelain and veiny, her nose Roman and magnificent.

This was my great aunt, as portrayed by the Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchew in 1935. Then aged 51, her reputation as a great English poet was firmly established. Her status as a style icon was a work in progress.

But when she died in 1964, her appearance and dress were weighed equally with her literary output. The New York Times described her as ‘a woman of the past, who looked and dressed like a Tudor monarch or a figure out of a medieval tapestry’. 

It continued, ‘Dame Edith was six feet tall. An aquiline nose and heavy-lidded eyes added to her almost Plantagenet look, which she accentuated with elaborate hats, or turbans and long flowing gowns, sometimes of startling Chinese red, sometimes of intricate brocade. She was addicted to large jewellery and gold armlets, and her fingers were ringed with pebble-size aquamarines.’

Now anyone dining with us would get a good view of her. Often the uninitiated shudder at the sight. Others, especially those familiar with her persona or poems, declare the painting glorious.

I look at it with affection. Proud to call her my great-aunt and amused at the memory of what we did with some of her old clothes. They were stored in an attic with other costumes at Weston Hall, relics of everyday and special-occasion clothes of my 18th-century ancestors. As a bony teenager I could fit into the brocade waistcoats and britches.

A few years later, it was Edith’s cape that I would wear to enhance the escapades that went with a weekend with friends, hitting the cocktails.

Now, aside from the bits and pieces kept by me and my siblings, these cloaks, rings and hats are up for auction; our former playthings presented as historical artefacts. Any future collector spotting stains can blame me and a decadent negroni.

But each lot helps to tell an extraordinary story, be it the feather hat that adorns Edith’s head in a photograph by Cecil Beaton, or the pink and green silk brocade dress that backs up her own claim, to John Freeman in the BBC interview Face to Face in 1959, that, ‘I can’t wear fashionable clothes. If I walked round in coats and skirts, people would doubt the existence of the Almighty.’

Look it up on YouTube in a quiet moment and you’ll get a measure of the wit, brilliance and originality of Edith Sitwell. While she died five years before I was born, her presence was there through childhood and beyond. There weren’t just the clothes at Weston, where we grew up, there were the books. 

Dozens of her own writings kept in the attics and, in one dusty room at the top of the house, her personal library – a vast collection of contemporary poems and novels, and a large quantity of her secret passion: crime fiction. It all helped to build a picture of Edith, a unique literary talent and voice of the 20th century.

She was born in 1887 to my great-grandfather Sir George Sitwell and his younger wife Lady Ida, daughter of the Earl of Londesborough, and literally the girl next door to the family’s summer home on the crescent in Scarborough. Sir George was an austere Edwardian figure. He preferred his own company, making a rare exception for his butler, Henry Moat. 

Moat was from a family of whalers in Whitby and was retained by the Sitwells for 43 years. He had 18 brothers, one sister and a pet seal; Edith described him as ‘an enormous purple man like a benevolent hippopotamus’.

Her parents were remote from her. Her mother, frivolous and gregarious, suited what Sir George looked for in a wife – a fine aristocratic line and baroque beauty – yet a more ill-suited couple one struggles to imagine. Edith recalled what she described as ‘the poor creature, married against her will into a kind of slave-bondage’. Lady Ida was a young 17-year-old, Sir George an Edwardian 30-something.

He spent hours holed up in the study of the vast Gothic Renishaw Hall near Chesterfield, dwelling on the most obscure topics. The legacy of his works includes: The Introduction of the Peacock into Western Gardens, Rotherham Under Cromwell, Modern Modifications on Leaden Jewellery in the Middle Ages, Lepers’ Squints, Domestic Manners in Sheffield in the Year 1250, A Short History of the Fork and the results of his studies into insomnia, entitled The Twenty-Seven Postures of Sir George R Sitwell.

Outside, he designed a garden of Italian splendour, of topiary hedges, stone steps, statues and fountains. Irritated once at the sight of a field of unaesthetic cows on the horizon, he commissioned a local artist to paint pastel colours on to the beasts’ hides.

He installed a notice at the house that read: ‘I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict me in any way, as it interferes with the functioning of the gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night.’

Ida, meanwhile, according to the biographer Sarah Bradford, could be found come lunchtime still ‘in bed in a bedroom heavy with the scent of discarded gardenias and tuberoses, reading French novels, newspapers or letters, or playing patience on a flat-folding leather card-tray’.

When generosity to her friends and extravagance dragged her deep into debt, afraid to tell her husband, she became involved with an unscrupulous moneylender. The upshot was a fraud trial at the Old Bailey. 

Sir George’s insistence that the criminal involved face justice meant that the scandalous trial in 1915 revealed, among other things, that Ida had borrowed money from her maids. She was sentenced to three months at Holloway prison for fraud.

‘How did it feel when your mother went to prison?’ the writer Stephen Spender once asked Edith. ‘Not altogether pleasant,’ she replied. ‘Because, you see, in those days one did not go to prison.’

Edith claimed she was unloved from birth, Sir George’s shock at the arrival of a girl subsiding only at the arrival of her younger brothers Osbert, in 1892, and Sacheverell, in 1897.

She recalled once that her only friend, aged four, was a peacock. Her father disapproved of this strange union so found the bird a peahen companion. ‘After which he never looked at me again and my heart was broken,’ she later reflected.

While she contended with the remoteness and occasional cruelties of her father – he visited a specialist in Harley Street with the idea of straightening her back and nose – she also spent much of her time trying to escape her mother’s violent rages. She befriended the servants who, if they heard her mother coming, would lock her in the silver pantry for what Natasha, Lady Spender, one of Edith’s closest friends, once described to me as ‘benign protective custody’.

‘I don’t believe there is another family in England who have had parents like ours,’ Edith once wrote to her brother Osbert, speaking of her ‘terrible childhood’ and ‘appalling home’.

It was once suggested to her that she might have been an awkward child: ‘Were you a handful for your parents?’ asked an interviewer. ‘My parents were a handful for me,’ she replied. ‘They weren’t parents I would recommend to anyone.’

Their eccentricities did, however, forge a close bond between the siblings and, when they all came to write, thrust them forward as a unique literary trio. Sacheverell, over the course of his life, wrote some 130 books; Osbert’s autobiography Left Hand Right Hand, among numerous other works, is considered a classic; and Edith of course developed into a very serious poet.

Her Façade poems were set to music by William Walton, the Lancashire composer who had befriended Sacheverell at Oxford. Described in an early review as ‘drivel they paid to hear’, the piece remains an acclaimed piece of avant-garde musical theatre. 

Having performed it with a small orchestra myself, often co-narrating the poems with the broadcaster Zeb Soanes, I can attest to their extraordinary musicality, vivid colour and rhythm. I call it early white rap.

Edith was a brave poet too. Still Falls the Rain is a haunting poem about the savagery of war; the tragedy of the Blitz air raids. She gave a reading of it at an officers’ mess during the Second World War. Halfway through, the air-raid siren started. While everyone clambered under the tables, she remained standing, continuing to read.

As she grew in stature, so she became renowned for her sense of style. She was, the writer Elizabeth Bowen once commented, ‘like an altar on the move’.

Weston Hall, with almost 60 rooms, and large attics, had space for Edith’s clothes, but neither I nor my siblings have room for them in our homes. Our joint decision to sell her gowns, capes, hats, rings and bangles enables others to have the chance to own a piece of Edith.

As her literary executor, I have a most precious possession: I own her poetry (well, until the copyright runs out in 2034). It is tangible. After all, the The Times Literary Supplement said of her first slim volume of poems, published in 1915: ‘They come from within. Miss Sitwell does not describe, she lives in verse.’

But if many of her poems are forgotten, her appearance, once seen, is hard to ignore. Virginia Woolf described her, aged 40, as ‘having something ghostlike and angular about her’, while the Australian painter Stella Bowen, meeting her in Paris, called her ‘the English aristocrat, six feet tall, aquiline, haughty, dressed in long robes and wearing barbaric ornaments’.

As the Guardian writer Rachel Cooke has commented, ‘Her costumes speak volumes about life as a 20th-century poet: the sheer courage involved.’ There was no point in being modest, or dressing modestly. ‘I had to learn,’ said Edith, ‘not to be timid.’ Her clothes were a visual weapon against reticence, her slender fingers emboldened by gemstones.

Her clothes armoured her, but they weren’t always practical. Family legend has it that a search party was once sent to find Edith in the garden at Weston Hall when she hadn’t returned from a walk for tea. 

It was Noël Coward who discovered her, unable to see beyond the huge brow of the hat she was wearing and ‘lost among the cabbages’.

What the clothes fetch, what taxable pot the ensuing funds will slide into I resile from. But how does one place a value on such things? For us, they are simply another heartbreaking reminder of how the Inland Revenue and insurance forced us to break up a family home of rooms that were time capsules of English history.

‘The estimates are based on the intrinsic value of each piece,’ Joe Robinson of auction house Dreweatts tells me. ‘It’s up to people’s competitive nature to determine the value of the provenance.’

Well, if no one bids, I’m sure I can find a cupboard for a cape and an ostrich-feather hat. And if you spot a tall creature on the edge of Exmoor looking like a figure from medieval tapestry, don’t be alarmed. That’ll be me tapping into the soul of Great-Aunt Edith in search of some dazzling originality for my next restaurant review.

Weston Hall and the Sitwells: A Family Legacy. Pre-exhibition at Donnington Priory: 10-15 November. Auction: 16-17 November. For more details, visit Dreweatts.