Modernist Literary Collaborations between Women and Men

Major figures including W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf viewed 'cross-sex' collaboration as a valuable, and often subversive, strategy for bringing women and men's differing perspectives into productive dialogue while harnessing the creative potential of gendered discord. This study is the first to acknowledge collaboration between women and men as an important part of the modernist effort to 'make it new.' Drawing on current methods from textual scholarship to read modernist texts as material, socially constructed products of multiple hands, the study argues that cross-sex collaboration involved writers working not just with each other, but also with publishers and illustrators. By documenting and tracing the contours of their desire for cross-sex collaboration, we gain a new understanding of the modernists' thinking about sex and gender relations, as well as three related topics of great interest to them: marriage, androgyny, and genius.

• Documents examples of the pervasive desire for collaboration between women and men in the modernist period, revealing to readers an important, largely overlooked dimension of the modernist effort
• Uses current methods from textual scholarship to examine instances of writers working not only with each other but also with publishers and illustrators, offering readers broadened understanding of what literary collaboration entails
• Describes the modernists' tendency to use conflict between the sexes as a creative catalyst and infuse the texts they made together with evidence of that conflict, showing readers how deeply imbued gender conflict was in the foundations of modernism itself