Life & Wisdom Quote by Edith Sitwell

Sitwell’s jab lands because it’s both absurdly pastoral and surgically elitist: if you’re going to insist on producing words, at least have the decency to be good at it. “Keeping rabbits” is not just a random domestic alternative. It’s a miniature of honest, tactile labor set against the paper-pushing glut of mediocre prose. The image is funny because it’s incongruous (high culture collapsing into hutches and feed) and because it pretends to offer kindly career guidance while clearly delivering a slap.

The specific intent is gatekeeping with panache. Sitwell isn’t critiquing reading as a habit; she’s swiping at a literary climate where publication is cheap, talk is loud, and standards feel negotiable. Her phrasing (“a great many people now reading and writing”) widens the net: the problem isn’t only bad authors, it’s a culture of mutual back-patting where everyone participates as critic, creator, and consumer, regardless of taste or talent. The line implies an ecosystem clogged with self-importance, where the act of having an opinion has started to masquerade as having expertise.

Context matters: Sitwell wrote from inside a modernist moment obsessed with new forms and new reputations, when little magazines, manifestos, and social circles could manufacture “importance” quickly. Her aristocratic sensibility and sharpness about pose make the insult double-edged: it condemns the amateurs, but it also mocks the whole performance of literary seriousness. Rabbits, at least, don’t pretend.