Dora Marsden - Work As Editor

Work As Editor

Her most important cultural contribution was the editing of three publications, the latter more or less continuations of the previous series, beginning in late 1911:

• The Freewoman, November 1911 – October 1912
• The New Freewoman, June 1913 – December 1913
• The Egoist, January 1914 – December 1919

The magazines were mainly published under the patronage of Harriet Shaw Weaver. During the course of publication the political bias of Marsdens editorials tackled subjects related mainly to feminism. Though she also commented on egoism and individualist anarchism, her quarrels with Benjamin Tucker ended with her rejection of Tuckerian anarchism and an embrace of "archism".

Literally, the publications were high-standing, propelling the modernist movement. Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Herbert Read and James Joyce contributed material to the periodical. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published for the first time as a series in The Egoist.

The Egoist was partially inspired by the nineteenth-century philosophical egoist Max Stirner. Though many assume the magazine's new title was suggested by Ezra Pound, it was actually Marsden's invention seconded by Pound in print. Pound's early association with Marsden and The Egoist encouraged Pound's nascent interest in the relationship between poetry and politics. The term "egoist" was in circulation at the time, associated with writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Maurice Barrès. When Stirner's book The Ego and its Own was published, Marsden never fully reviewed it. She did, however, praise Stirner's work and wrote at least two editorials following Stirner's ideas. In the September 1913 issue of The New Freewoman, Marsden proclaimed Stirner's book "the most powerful work that has ever emerged from a single human mind." Later, however, she later partly dismissed it, mostly on the ground that she disagreed with Stirner about the nature of God: Stirner saw God as a repressive idea, imposed from the outside, from society, so it could control the individual. Alternatively, Marsden claimed that god was an invention of the self in its attempt to encompass the world and rule over it, hence, a positive, freeing idea.