Books: World's End

I LIVE UNDER A BLACK SUN—Edith Sit-well—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Of England's group of brilliant, middleaged, aristocratic women writers, whose leading light is Virginia Woolf, six-foot Poet Edith Sitwell is the most backwardly brilliant of them all. Obscure in her poetry, subacid in her satire, she finds the 18th Century real, the present ghostly.

I Live Under a Black Sun, her first novel, combines all these quiddity qualities. It contains two interwoven stories.

One, comprising most of the book, is an intense, imaginative version of Swift's tormented love life with Stella and Vanessa.

The other concerns...