ABSTRACT
The little magazines Dora Marsden brought into being between 1911 and 1919-The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist-function as a kind of critical condenser, an occulted but potent transmitter of sociocultural currents. The discursive milieu and dramatis personae of Marsden’s very eclectic journals continue to offer a prime site at which to investigate the discursive layering of politics, science, and literature within modern culture. The tone of that discursive milieu is set by Marsden’s own editorial contributions: lead articles, topical commentaries, and extended philosophical meditations. These texts have not been redacted since their original publication. While The New Freewoman and The Egoist have been issued in reprint editions, The Freewoman has not. Marsden’s writings there are especially difficult to consult, which is unfortunate, as they document the most intense period of her doctrinal reorientations from suffragist feminism to individualist anarchism and the egoistic emphases of her literary and philosophical criticisms. In Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science, I draw out a series of key statements from Marsden’s Freewoman writings, in an effort to understand the conceptual logic of her sociopolitical transformations.
