Florence Margaret Smith, who would become known as Stevie Smith, was born in Hull, England.
Stevie Smith was born Florence Margaret Smith on September 20, 1902, in Hull, Yorkshire, England. She was the second daughter of Ethel Rachel and Charles Ward Smith, a shipping company owner. Her early childhood was marked by family instability: her father largely abandoned the family to pursue a career at sea, and when Stevie was three years old, her mother moved the family to Palmers Green, North London, where Stevie would live for the rest of her life.
The move to the house on Avondale Road, which she shared with her mother and her aunt Margaret Annie Spear (whom she affectionately called 'the Lion Aunt'), proved formative. Her mother's ill health and eventual death when Stevie was sixteen deeply affected her, and themes of illness, death, and domestic confinement would permeate her later poetry.
Her unusual nickname 'Stevie' was acquired in her twenties, given by friends who thought she resembled the jockey Steve Donoghue, and it stuck for the rest of her life, effectively replacing her birth name in both her personal and professional identity. This origin story itself became part of the idiosyncratic, playful persona she cultivated as one of Britain's most distinctive twentieth-century poets.