[Vwoolf] VW and female artists in Paris (American expatriates, G. Stein, the Little Review, H.D., etc)

Paloma Etienne palomaetienne at hotmail.com
Thu Dec 12 12:45:31 EST 2013




Hi :) 
I've noticed that VW didn't seem to have met or commented much on the Paris expatriate/international women modernist writers nor the female writers from Greenwich Village and the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's and 30's.  She did meet Gertrude Stein at a party, but found her too expansive, clowny and pretentious (Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf). 
She also met Gisèle Freund through Victoria Ocampo who was have been very enthusiastic about the international female modernist communities, but Virginia, although she had those fantastic photos taken by Freund, felt that the visit was an invasion on her privacy and got angry at Ocampo. 
Apparently, according to H. Lee, she didn't warm to Vita's bisexual and lesbian friends neither, and detested their meetings as "2nd rate school girl atmosphere". She was probably extremely jealous ofVita flirting and camping out :) with Dorothy Wellesley, Hilda Matheson and Mary Campbell. 
So, although she visited Ethel Sands' and Nan Hudson 's château in Northern France, she wasn't impressed by them, to my dismay,refusing a friendship with the likes of Edy Craig, Christopher St. John ("Tony" - the painter Claire Attwood), and neither showed much interest by Smallhythe, their converted theatre despite the fact that Virginia had written plays herself.  What a missed opportunity! 
What about Vanessa? I don't know if she ever met with the women modernist painters. Are there any records in the letters, etc?
Virginia Woolf turned down Ivy Compton-Burnett's Brothers and Sisters for the Hogarth Press, but did publish Ruth Manning-Sanders, and also Hope Mirrlees' "Paris: a Poem". The poem was considered by Virginia Woolf 'obscure, indecent, and brilliant'. Mirrlees was a friend of Virginia Woolf, who described her in a letter as "her own heroine – capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed".
Could Poetry Magazine and The Little Review publications be away from her desk? Janet Flanner surely shared Virginia's wittiness and sense of irony, but did they ever meet? Was there a reciprocical interest? All these women were extremely influential on other writers (T.S. Elliot,Bertrand Russell amongst many others, and are credited by them as leading artists that shaped modernist literature in their own right). So many of these women received Pulitzer Prices for Poetry, but a lot of them were unearthed by 60s and 70s feminist scholars and other female and male writers that recovered them for the wider public and literature history. 
They were also journalists, painters, photographers, architects, sculptures, designers, publishers. Joyce encumbered the heights of literary history with his Ulysses, first serialised by the Little Review in France by Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, and championed and published in France by Sylvia Beach first, who became bankrupt and ignored by Joyce when he then went to Random House and abandoned her upon achieving notoriety. It was also painstainkingly and enthusiastically helped in its French promotion by Beach's lover Adrienne Monnier. Both women gave Joyce and many other male writers from the Lost Generation a platform at her legendary labours of love: Beach's Shakespeare and Co. and Monnier's La Maison des Amis des Livres.  I would like to know if VW ever heard of H.D.’s work. VW had real passion for classic Greeks, and H.D. was devoted to reenacting a new rendition of Sappho’s poetry. What about the editors Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore and Alice Corbin Henderson? 
I'm a rabid fan of Virginia, and I'm also discovering the wonderful and talented female modernists and imagists and I'm amazed at the contribution and fantastic art of that generation. What would have Virginia thought of their work and lifestyles if she had noticed them enough? Oh, dear, oh, dear, I really think that Vita should have got into publishing!!!!
 		 	   		  
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