Dora Marsden & Early Modernism

BOOK REVIEWS Dora Marsden & Early Modernism Bruce Clarke. Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism , Science. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 273 pp. $37.50 DORA MARSDEN'S lasting claim to fame rests on the three journals that she founded and edited: the Freewoman, the New Freewoman , and the Egoist. These publications were vehicles of radical opinion in Britain between 1911 and 1919, and also included among their editorial staff such writers of future distinction as Ezra Pound, Rebecca West, Richard Aldington and T. S. Eliot. The New Freewoman and the Egoist provided a forum for some Imagist works. Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first appeared, in serial form, in the Egoist, and was published as a book by the Freewoman Press. Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce's major patron, supplied anonymous and substantial financial support for the two later journals, gave considerable personal support to Marsden, and gradually took over key editorial responsibilities. Dora Marsden was a person of great talent, drive and originality whose potential was never fulfilled. Born in 1882, she was, like D. H. Lawrence, one of the early generation of working-class children to benefit from the 1870 Education Act, which mandated elementary education for all and strengthened the preparation of teachers. She became a "pupil teacher" at the age of thirteen, and went on to take a degree in humanities from Manchester University, qualifying her to teach in secondary schools. By the age of twenty-one, she was the principal of a teacher training center, but gave up a promising career in education to join the Women's Social and Political Union, the women's suffrage group founded by Emmeline Pankhurst. In her early days in the WSPU, she was hailed by Emmeline PethickLawrence as "a brave and beautiful spirit" (the title of Les Garner's biography, published by Avebury, 1990). She worked energetically for the cause, spent some time in prison, and carried out such daring acts of sabotage as climbing onto the roof of the Southport Empire Theater in order to heckle Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, from a window opening high above the stage while he addressed a meeting, one of the few occasions on which he was publicly unnerved. In early 1911 she resigned from the WSPU on account of the autocratic manner and narrow focus of its leadership, and established the Freewoman later that same year. The New Freewoman was founded after the financial collapse of the Freewoman, and the name subsequently changed to the Egoist to 91 ELT 41:1 1998 reflect Marsden's waning interest in feminism and greater focus upon self-sustaining and anarchistic individualism. She gradually withdrew from a central editorial position as she became more absorbed in her own writing on philosophical, mythological and semantic topics. Living in isolation, she devoted herself to a magnum opus which, when it was published in 1928 in diminished form at Weaver's expense, was received with scorn or silence. Sadly, this gifted woman spent the last twenty-five years of her life in a mental hospital. Dora Marsden founded the Freewoman to voice her criticism of the Pankhurst suffrage movement, which she judged to be narrowly focused on the vote and on the aspirations of middle-class women, while ignoring the situation of working-class women and the effects of patriarchy upon women's social, political and sexual freedom. Her leader in the first issue of the journal is a manifesto for a new movement of female autonomy. She presents the memorable image of a woman as "a kind of human poultice, or, more poetically, the illusion softening reality" for a man, and initiates her campaign to assert that women must break away from subordination and "find her place among the masters." Bruce Clarke suggests that Dora Marsden's most significant creation is probably "her projected ideal of genius as a superhuman female, a feminist retort to Nietzsche's Ãœbermensch as egoistic superman." His goals in this study are to place Marsden within early modernism, to examine her central ideas in the light of other contemporary thinking, and to assess her impact as a writer and a thinker. He is successful, and...