Reconsidering the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Kay Boyle: Feminist Aesthetics and Modernism

By contributing to little magazines that facilitated public discourse around female identities, female bodies, inequality, aesthetics, politics, and female authorship, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) and Kay Boyle (1902–1992) participated in an alternative approach to avant-garde literature, one that is indebted to feminist ideology and modernist aesthetics. Their work embodies the spirit of a feminist strain of modernism, and yet these two important women writers (important in their day and currently on the fringes of canonicity) are largely neglected. This article discusses the Baroness’s and Boyle’s critical engagement with gender in twentieth-century manifestos and poems, and it considers the feminist revolution of the word, as well as engagement with the female body, within the selected texts. Close readings of the Baroness’s “The Modest Woman” (1921) and “Circle” (1923) and Boyle’s “The Revolution of the Word” (1928) and “The Artist Speaks—The Woman Answers” (1960) are presented. Further study of their literary works will participate in feminist recovery or revival work and will show the additional ways in which they (and others) contributed to a feminist brand of modernism.