Good afternoon team,

How is it going! Britishers, are you stoked for the long weekend? I am. Americans, don't worry, Labor Day is quite soon. I hope that in Europe as well you have an upcoming holiday. I'm not going to even pretend that today's theme, modernism, is related to bank holidays.

I mean, it's specifically modernist women that you might not have heard of or that you might like being reminded of! Let's start with Amy Lowell, poet and… kind of impressario, I think. She did a lot for the scene and that doesn't always get you the recognition you deserve:

“God made me a business woman,” Lowell is reported to have quipped, “and I made myself a poet.” During a career that spanned just over a dozen years, she wrote and published over 650 poems, yet scholars cite Lowell’s tireless efforts to awaken American readers to contemporary trends in poetry as her more influential contribution to literary history.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/amy-lowell

Here's one of her poems:

Autumn

But each leaf is fringed with silver.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14531/autumn-56d208413503b

Of course, you know of Zelda Fitzgerald as the author of Save Me the Waltz, but did you also know that she was an artist - both fine and family. She made so many little paper dolls for her daughter to play with, delightful wee dresses and all:

Here's a book review of a collection of her art:

Zelda: An Illustrated Life […] collects 140 illustrations and 80 of her paintings from the late 1930s and 1940s, lovingly compiled by her granddaughter, the Vermont-based writer, filmmaker and artist Eleanor Anne Lanahan. From her cityscapes of New York City and Paris to her psychedelic Biblical allegories to her delicate paper dolls she made for her daughter Scottie, the art paints an intricate picture of her psychoemotional world and reflects her passion for fairy tales, her irreverent dance with the absurd, and her enormous sensitivity to beauty — a visual reflection of the blend of intense intelligence and unapologetic mischievousness that made Zelda so alluring.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/04/15/zelda-fitzgerald-art/

Finally, let's end in the Harlem Renaissance with Gladys Bentley; gender innovator and, if this article as anything to go by, a proper laugh on a night out:

While as a blues singer she followed the trope of the down-on-her-luck woman mistreated by men, as a nightclub entertainer Bentley donned masculine outfits and haircuts, flirted with women, and performed sexually charged songs whose lyrics were often a rewritten, bawdy version of popular white ballads. She is considered one of the first drag kings, and impersonated that kind of mock, stereotyped masculinity that is typical of drag acts. However she did not try to pass for a man, nor was she preoccupied with concealing her love for women off the stage.

https://www.theheroinecollective.com/gladys-bentley/

Love,

Alex.