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

‘The tension between collective creativity and individual genius is again under inspection, this time by Russell McDonald in Modernist Literary Collaborations Between Men and Women … Conflict underpins much of the work described in the book. The author calls it a ‘discord aesthetic’ and goes so far as to suggest that a distinctive modernist style was the direct result of productive tensions and inequalities between men and women.’

Jade French Source: Times Literary Supplement