Dora Marsden

Who was Dora Marsden?

Dora Marsden was an English anarcho-feminist, suffragette, editor of literary journals, and philosopher of language. Beginning her career as an activist in the Women's Social and Political Union, Marsden eventually broke off from the suffragist organization in order to found a journal that would provide a space for more radical voices in the movement. Over the next 7 years, Marsden's would editorially preside over three successive journals that increasingly focused on avant-garde cultural politics, eventually publishing prominent early works by many of the most important Anglo-American and French high modernists. Scholarly opinion varies about her significance to the emergence of literary modernism. While classic studies of modernism downplay or ignore her, more recent studies have begun to emphasize her impact on the nascent tradition, with one going so far as to call her the "fugitive midwife to the miraculous birth of a literary tradition."