Women Authors (ekphrasis)

Romaine Brooks (1874–1970) was an American painter most known for her muted color palette and deeply personal portraits that challenged conventional ideas of gender and sexuality. Among her sitters were the dancer Ida Rubinstein and the poet and novelist Natalie Barney. She spent most of her life in Paris, where she was a leading figure of an artistic counterculture of upper-class Europeans and American expatriates, many of whom were creative, bohemian, and homosexual. Brooks’s career reached its height in 1925, when her work was exhibited in London, Paris, and New York. In the 1930s, Brooks began work on her autobiography, No Pleasant Memories, which consists of sketches of her troubled childhood, musings on artists’ roles in society, and reflections on her own rejection of the norms and traditions of art. Largely forgotten by art history, Brooks bequeathed a number of her paintings to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, where recent exhibitions have sparked a renewed interest in her work.

Born Hilda Doolittle, H.d. (1886–1961) was an American poet and novelist associated with Imagism, an avant-garde literary movement that emerged in London during the early twentieth century. Her first and perhaps best- known collection of poetry, Sea Garden (1916), exemplifies the precise imagery and sharp language favored by Imagism and her contemporaries Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. H.D.’s writing was often deeply personal, merging her unstable private life, marred as it was by frequent illness and loss, with the evocative images and stories of the ancient world. Together with her companion Bryher, she traveled throughout Europe, in particular to Greece, and to Egypt, sites that would continue to inspire her late into her life and have a profound impact on her final poems, such as the revisionary epic Helen in Egypt(1961). Though somewhat overshadowed by her male contemporaries in historical and critical ac- counts of modernist movements, H.D. is one of the most important and inimitable writers of her time.

Under the pseudonym Vernon Lee, Violet Paget (1856–1935) published a bewildering variety of work, including historical studies; meditative essays on art, music, gardens, and travel; philosophical dialogues; treatises on aesthetic theory and psychology; and supernatural tales. Born to a cosmopolitan English family, she settled in Florence, where she maintained friendships with artists and intellectuals throughout the world, including John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Edith Wharton, J.A. Symonds, Walter Pater, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and G.B. Shaw. In close collaboration with her partner, the artist Kit Anstruther-Thompson, she was one of the first English thinkers to seriously engage with German empathy theory. Together, they tried to capture the mysterious and complex workings of art on our bodies, our minds, and our social lives; one of the fruits of this investigation was the 1912 volume Beauty and Ugliness, which included and analyzed long excerpts from Lee’s own Gallery Diaries. Partially as a result of her strong pacifist politics and opposition to World War I, Lee became somewhat estranged from the literary establishment, although she continued to write prolifically until her death.

The American writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was a major figure in the avant-garde visual arts and literary spheres in the period between World Wars I and II. Stein moved in 1903 to Paris, where she met Alice B. Toklas, who would remain her companion for forty years. Their home in Paris functioned as a salon for many now celebrated writers and artists, who became close acquaintances. Stein is recognized for coining the term the “Lost Generation” to describe American authors living abroad, including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. Revered and feared for both her literary and artistic expertise, Stein has, in no small part, shaped how we understand and appreciate modernism today. Stein’s best-known books include The Making of Americans (1925), How to Write (1931), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), as well as her poetry collection Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems [1929–1933] (1956).

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. In addition to her groundbreaking novels, she was an admired literary critic, and authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories. With her husband Leonard Woolf she founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish some of the most important modernist texts of the twentieth century including her own.

Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Orbit(2017), as well as five books for children and a collection of essays, An Enlarged Heart: A Per­sonal History(2013). Her honors and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literature, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, Zarin teaches at Yale University.

Dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes the ekphrasis series is part of David Zwirner Books’s ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.

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