This event is now fully booked. You can join the waitlist and you will receive an email if any tickets become available. Alternatively, there are tickets available for the following talk as part of the Beyond Bloomsbury programme:

• Lunchtime Talk: Besides Bloomsbury - Queer Arts of the 20th Century, Thursday 10th February 1pm. Info and book here.

Renishaw Hall, a mere 10 miles from the Millenium Galleries in Sheffield, is the ancestral home of the Sitwell ‘literary trio’ of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell. Their individual careers spanned more than half a century, during periods of immense social and cultural change in Britain.

Yet almost exactly 100 years on from the Sitwells’ explosive arrival on the British literary scene in the 1920s, the interest and appreciation of their work has faded, although their public personas continue to fascinate.

So, who were Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell and how significant were their cultural contributions? From avant garde poets to cultural crusaders, art collecting to patronage across the arts, ‘eccentric’ exhibitionists to national treasures the Sitwells certainly divided opinion.

They are as interesting for who they knew – friends and enemies- as for their literary output. ‘Sitwellism’ and the Bloomsbury group, shared similar principles on the one hand but fulfilled these in very different ways.

Behind the Façade: The Sitwells Revealed is an invitation to learn more about Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell and to gain some insight into their often complicated links with their equally complex fellow writers and artists in the Bloomsbury set.

After a decade of working in Renishaw’s private family archive, Chris Beevers will use images, letters, and stories from the archives never intended for publication, to present a fresh and entertaining narrative of the Sitwell ‘trio ‘or this ‘nest of tigers’ as Edith described themselves, adding to the current exhibition’s welcome spotlight on the Bloomsbury’s often overlooked peers.

This talk is part of the programme of events complementing the exhibition Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy, which is open at the Millennium Gallery until Sunday 13 February.

Image credit: Performance of Facade, 1926 © Renishaw Hall Collections