Introduction

The story of Elsa the Dada Baroness transpired in a milieu of literary queer feminist icons circa World War I. This story was best told in 1930, in the book My Thirty Years’ War by Margaret Anderson. Anderson was the radical publisher (with Jane Heap) of the Little Review, the international modernist-Dadaist-anarchist magazine that punched above its weight and first serialized Joyce’s Ulysses. I bought my copy of My Thirty Years’ War hoping for a great first-person account of the landmark obscenity trial that ensued over Ulysses, but Anderson barely mentions it. However she does say a lot about the Baroness. Anderson got to know the Baroness by publishing her poems; every history of the Baroness goes through Margaret Anderson.

My Thirty Years’ War is in the public domain and, as evidence of that, my copy has a typo in the title on the front cover, and a couple pages are in the wrong order. But it has the goods. I also read Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity — A Cultural Biography by Irene Gammel. My copy of that has no typos and a hundred pages of footnotes, and it’s where I found accounts of the Baroness by another writer Anderson was publishing: Djuna Barnes. Like Anderson, Barnes became a supporting character in the Baroness’ story. (more…)