Margaret Anderson’s Last Laugh: The Victory of My Thirty Years’ War

Abstract:My Thirty Years’ War is the autobiography of Margaret Anderson, editor of the modernist journal the Little Review. Published in 1930 but overlooked by theorists of lesbian literature, the autobiography challenges early twentieth-century images of the lesbian as a tormented misfit. An important precursor to the liberatory project of lesbian feminism, My Thirty Years’ War also anticipates current feminist reconsiderations of modernism in its decentring of the movement’s male giants to highlight instead the influence and aesthetics of the woman who published their work.