Margaret Caroline Anderson

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Margaret Caroline Anderson bigraphy, stories - Literary

Margaret Caroline Anderson : biography

November 24, 1886 – October 19, 1973

Margaret Caroline Anderson (November 24, 1886 – October 19, 1973) was the American founder, editor and publisher of the art and literary magazine The Little Review, which published a collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. New York Times, August 16, 1970. The periodical is most noted for introducing many prominent American and British writers of the 20th century, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in the United States, and publishing the first thirteen chapters of James Joyce’s then-unpublished novel, Ulysses. Women Editing Modernism: "little" Magazines & Literary History, by Jayne E. Marek. Published by University Press of Kentucky, 1995. ISBN 0-8131-0854-3. Britannica.com. Thomas Mask – New York Times, August 3, 1970.

A large collection of her papers on Gurdjieff’s teaching is now preserved at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. at Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Early life

Anderson was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the eldest of three daughters of Arthur Aubrey Anderson and Jessie (Shortridge) Anderson. She graduated from high school in Anderson, Indiana in 1903, and then entered a two-year junior preparatory class at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio.

She left Western in 1906, at the end of her freshman year, to pursue a career as a pianist. In the fall of 1908 she left home for Chicago, where she reviewed books for a religious weekly (The Continent) before joining The Dial. By 1913 she was a book critic for the Chicago Evening Post.

Late life

By 1942 her relationship with Heap had cooled, and, evacuating from the war in France, Anderson sailed for the United States. Jane Heap had moved to London in 1935, where she led Gurdjieff study groups until her death in 1964. With her passage paid by Ernest Hemingway, Anderson met on the voyage Dorothy Caruso, widow of the singer and famous tenor Enrico Caruso. The two began a romantic relationship, and lived together until Caruso’s death in 1955. Anderson returned to Le Cannet after Caruso’s death, and there she died of emphysema on October 19, 1973. She is buried beside Georgette Leblanc in the Notre Dame des Anges Cemetery.

In Media

She was the subject of an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject nominated documentary entitled, Beyond Imagining: Margaret Anderson and the "Little Review" in 1991, by Wendy L. Weinberg. New York Times. The Little Review.

Celebrating the life and work of Margaret Anderson and the Little Review’s remarkable influence, an exhibition "Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson and the Little Review" was opened at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, from October, 2006, and ran for three months.

Gurdjieff

The teachings of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff played an important role in Anderson’s life. Anderson met Gurdjieff in Paris and, together with Leblanc, began studies with him, focusing on his original teaching called The Fourth Way. From 1935 to 1939, Anderson and Georgette Leblanc studied with Gurdjieff as part of a group of women known as "The Rope", which included eight members in all: Jane Heap, Elizabeth Gordon, Solita Solano, Kathryn Hulme, Louise Davidson and Alice Rohrer, besides them. gurdjieff-legacy.org. Along with Katherine Mansfield and Jean Heap, she remains one of most noted institutee of Gurdjieff’s, ‘Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man’, at Fontainebleau, near Paris, France from October 1922 to 1924. Time, Mar 24, 1930.

Anderson studied with Gurdjieff in France until his death in October 1949, writing about him and his teachings in most of her books, most extensively in her memoir, The Unknowable Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff .

The Little Review

In March 1914, Anderson founded the avant-garde literary magazine The Little Review during Chicago’s literary renaissance, which became not just influential, but soon created a unique place for itself and for her in the American literary and artistic history. Dictionary of Literary Biography on Margaret (Caroline) Anderson. "The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English", by Lorna Sage, Germaine Greer, Elaine Showalter. Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-66813-1. "Page 16". "An organ of two interests, art and good talk about art", the monthly’s first issue featured articles on Nietzsche, feminism and psychoanalysis. Early funding was intermittent, and for six months in 1914, she was forced out of her Chicago residence at 837 West Ainslie Street, and the magazine’s offices at Chicago Fine Arts Building at 410 S. Michigan Avenue, and camped with family and staff members on the shores of Lake Michigan.