“Women Publishers held”: The Little Review, Ulysses, and the Vice Society
Note: We will be returning to the censorship of The Little Review and Ulysses as the case heats up later in the year.
One hundred years ago today … Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editor/publishers of The Little Review, appeared in court, having been charged with distributing obscenity. Their accuser was John S. Sumner of the Society for the Suppression of Vice (whom we last saw on May 17 suppressing James Branch Cabell’s novel Jurgen.)
Margaret Anderson (left) and Jane Heap in two 1919 photos. Courtesy Modernista Research Guide: Unsung Heroines: Women of the Modernist Movement.
The Little Review, published out of 27 West 8 Street, was in hot water for having printed a portion of Chapter XIII of Ulysses, by James Joyce.
New York Tribune, 22 October 1920, p. 5. Chronicling America.
According to the Modernist Journals Project:
Founded by Margaret Anderson in March 1914, The Little Review became, over the course of its 15-year existence, one of the chief periodicals in the English-speaking world for publishing experimental writing and publicizing international art…. Anderson began editing The Little Review in Chicago, then moved the paper to New York in 1917 (after a short stint in San Francisco the year before), and later moved it overseas to Paris after 1922. Along the way, she was joined, in 1916, by Jane Heap, as co-editor, and then—heralding a new phase of the magazine—by Ezra Pound, as foreign editor, in 1917.
Anderson and Heap were represented by John Quinn, whom we last saw escorting William Butler Yeats around town.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, OCTOBER 21, 2020
TAGS: modernism, literature, avant-garde, experimental, women in literature, John Quinn, James Joyce