Introduction

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.

Significance of the Study

This study is the first to acknowledge collaboration between women and men as an important part of the modernist effort to make it new.

Methodology

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.

Implications

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.