Good morning everyone,

How are you doing this morning? Well, I hope, and I hope you're looking forward to reading about some modernist women this morning.

I've been reading about the literary magazines of the 1920s, and of course it all feels very distant. Firstly because it was a hundred years ago and secondly because those magazines were not particularly financially stable even at the time and you sort of cheer when they make it past their fifth year. Except! for! one! Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine, which she ran in a fairly financially and marketing savvy way, has become Poetry Foundation, beloved online poetry resource. The work that she did to make poetry a mainstream art form is still ongoing a hundred years later:

Monroe established an editorial policy independent of editorial preference or literary movements. According to Judith Paterson in a separate Dictionary of Literary Biography entry, Monroe’s commitment to such a policy ensured the magazine’s success. Paterson quoted the new editorial policy that appeared in the second issue of Poetry: “Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors … desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/harriet-monroe

Margaret Anderson was more… how can I say this… really significantly more nasty to her contributors than Harriet Monroe was. She'd rip into people whose work she had actually published in her magazine, the Little Review, telling Helen Hoyt for example that "you have a poem in this issue […] it is not Art; it is merely a rather good poem. You could have made it Art." The following month she issued 13 blank pages where usually there would be contributions (stories, poems etc) because nothing she received for that issue was good (or Art) enough. There's also a theory that she did this because she was just back from the summer hols and cba. Could go either way. Anyway, happy Pride month:

The Little Review is known both for its role in solidifying this modernist coterie and for its early championing of a variety of socio-political causes, including anarchism, gay rights, and workers’ rights. In the March 1915 issue, Anderson published what biographer Holly Baggett calls, according to the Chicago Tribune, “the first editorial by a lesbian on the treatment of gay people.” Anderson wrote, “With us love is just as punishable as murder or robbery.”

https://www.clmp.org/about-independent-publishing/history/the-little-review/

Here's a Helen Hoyt poem so you can decide if it is Art or merely a rather good poem:

Love faded in my heart—

This root that tears my heart!

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14266/the-root

Finally, Nella Larsen, whose superb (and btw short) novel Passing you would definitely enjoy if you have not already. Here's a good, long piece on her in the LRB. Some lovely details here:

Did Larsen take clothes too seriously? She added a purple cape to her nurse’s uniform, and wore antique necklaces and jade earrings on the hospital ward. According to Mary McCarthy, her stories always contained the sentence: ‘And there I was in the fullest of full evening dress.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n09/amber-medland/they-roared-with-laughter

Have a super weekend!

A xx.