Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mina Loy
-
Standard Name: Loy, Mina
Birth Name: Mina Gertrude Lowy
Self-constructed Name: Mina Loy
Married Name: Mina Gertrude Haweis
Married Name: Mina Gertrude Lloyd
ML
is best known for her formally and thematically innovative free verse, which appeared in little magazines in the 1910s and 1920s. She later distanced herself from this free verse movement, with which she was so strongly associated, claiming: My poetry had nothing to do with that movement.
qtd. in
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.
381
Instead, she turned to writing verse as one feels: I tried to forget that I had ever in my life read anything & see if I could let out that natural expression that must be innate to all mankind.
qtd. in
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.
381
In addition to her free verse, ML
wrote prose, including manifestoes, autobiography, and a novel, but very little of this was published during her lifetime. She also produced a wide range of visual art throughout her life; she asserted: The two, writing and painting, go together with me.
qtd. in
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace, 1959.
22, 26-7
With the loyal support of French literary figures such as Valery Larbaud
Friends, Associates
Harriet Shaw Weaver
McAlmon hosted a dinner party which Weaver attended together with Djuna Barnes
, William Bird
, sculptor Thelma Wood
, and Ezra Pound
, who mortified her by teasing her, quite without justification, about her...
Friends, Associates
Gertrude Stein
Over the years, the old crowd had begun to disperse and the Saturday evening salons were frequented more by writers and less by artists. Although GS
had published only a few volumes and had often...
DB
arrived in Paris with letters of introduction to Ezra Pound
and James Joyce
, and she soon came into contact with a great number of the US expatriates living there at this time, including...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sara Maitland
This genre seems almost impossible in the late twentieth century, but the authors believe that saints today are potentially spiritual resources whose presences through the traces they have left behind in the minds of the...
Occupation
Natalie Clifford Barney
In a letter to Gertrude Stein
written in December 1926, NCB
explains: The other night . . . I realized how little the French femmes de lettres know of English and Americans and vice versa...
Occupation
Natalie Clifford Barney
Gertrude Stein
was the featured writer at a gathering of the Académie des Femmes
at NCB
's salon. The programme included an introduction by Mina Loy
, Barney's French translations of The Making of Americans...
Textual Features
Fleur Adcock
She relates how in reading for the anthology she made discoveries and underwent conversions—one result of which had to be the jettisoning of some early choices whose phantoms later, for her, haunted the volume...
Textual Features
Djuna Barnes
Structured as a monthly chronicle, Ladies Almanack is a satiric lesbian cosmology based on Natalie Barney
and her circle in Paris. Among its characters are Patience Scalpel, based on Mina Loy
, Lady Buck-and-Balk and...