13 Modernist Women Writers to Rediscover and Read
By Francesca Mancino | On August 24, 2020 | Updated September 29, 2025 | Comments (2)
Though popular Modernist works that have endured to this day tend to gravitate toward male writers, there is no shortage of Modernist women writers who were well known in their day.
Their names appeared regularly on bestseller lists in the early 20th century, as readers embraced their works. Some of their work has fallen into a literary abyss, with little attention given to their work a century later. At right, May Sinclair.
Most of these women listed here were connected to one another in some way, either through schooling, a crossing of literary paths, or in reviewing another’s work.
What makes these names critical in understanding Modernist literature is that most, if not all, of these women were not confined to writing within the parameters of fiction. Their words wove through and throughout non-fiction, playwriting, criticism, literary magazines, poetry, translating, and more.
Britannica defines Modernist literature as the body of written works produced in the time of Modernism:
“A period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I (1914–18). Modernist literature developed throughout Europe, the United States, and Latin America.”
And from The Poetry Foundation:
“It grew out of the philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution, up to World War I and its aftermath. For artists and writers, the Modernist project was a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors.”
This presence of literary versatility flourished during the Modernist period for both women and men. Structural and stylistic constraints in the traditional novel, poetry, and other media broken and subverted, something that was reflected in societal conventions.
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Djuna Barnes (1892 – 1982)
Djuna Barnes was an American writer who became well known in the Parisian avant-garde literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s. Barnes’ first book-length work was The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings in 1915. It was brief, hardly more than a chapbook.
Ryder (1928) was influenced by a disastrous events in her life. Soon after came Ladies Almanack, a story about a lesbian social circle in Paris. Nightwood (1936) is considered her literary masterpiece, and is still regarded as one of the most influential works of modernist fiction. This experimental novel explores the lives and loves of five extraordinary people, and may be the first modern novel with a transgender character.
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Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman; 1894 – 1983)
Known primarily as Bryher, Annie Winifred Ellerman came from an affluent family, as her father was a shipping magnate. With her wealth, Bryher funded the endeavors of her literary friends.
In Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris, Noel Riley Fitch writes that Bryher gave Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company in Paris, “nearly $1,400” (in 1937) just to help keep the bookshop afloat. Bryher married fellow writer Robert McAlmon as a means of convenience, causing her then-husband to be nicknamed “Robert McAlimony,” according to his archives at Yale.
Bryher’s most known-of relationship is with poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who is coming up later in this roundup. A novelist in her own right, Bryher published over a dozen novels, including memoirs and poetry collections.
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E.M. Delafield (1890 – 1943)
Born to a count and a novelist, Diary of a Provincial Lady is one of several works that gave E.M. Delafield a name in her own right. As recently as May 2020, The Guardian featured an article by Kathryn Hughes claiming that Delafield should be more prevalent in contemporary literary discussions.
Though Diary of a Provincial Lady has not been out of print, Hughes attributes the “dusty and quaint” title and “the comedy servants” as possible reasons for warding away readers.
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H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was an American-born poet, novelist, translator, and essayist who wrote under the pen name H.D. She was profoundly influenced by the effects of World War I, and the subsequent trends of modernism, psychoanalysis, and feminism.
Her work is often framed within the context of other important modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. Today, she’s best remembered for her innovation and experimental approach to poetry. H.D’s first book of poetry, Sea Garden, was published in 1916 towards the end of the Imagist years and marked the beginning of her use of the natural world and its symbolism to explore ideas of consciousness and spirituality.
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Winifred Holtby (1898 – 1935)
In addition to Winifred Holtby’s schooling with other novelists including her good friend Vera Brittain, she knew Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf’s husband. In 1932, she published Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir. In its Author’s Note, she references meeting Virginia Woolf only a couple of times, yet she expresses her gratitude to her for aiding the composition of the book.
Holtby not only interviewed Woolf but, Woolf supplied her with “copies of some of her critical articles.” Most known for her posthumously-published book South Riding (1936) Holtby wrote short stories and plays, as well. South Riding made it to the big screen in 1938, three years after her death.
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Storm Jameson (1891 – 1986)
Penning nearly fifty novels, Storm Jameson wrote two series — Triumph of Time and Mirror in Darkness — and fifteen non-fiction works. Like many other female writers during the Modernist period, Jameson and her work are overlooked.
In British Fiction After Modernism, Elizabeth Maslin writes a chapter titled, “The Case for Storm Jameson.” There, she argues that because the weight tends to land on high Modernists, like Virginia Woolf, novelists that did not ascribe to the new novelistic conventions during the time are overshadowed.
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Margaret Kennedy (1896 – 1967)
Margaret Kennedy’s work made it onto the big screen in her day; before that, she went to school with writers Sylvia Thompson and Winifred Holtby.
In 1925 – the year that marks the publication of The Great Gatsby and Mrs. Dalloway – Kennedy’s novel, The Constant Nymph, reigned as the number two bestselling book. The Constant Nymph was just one of her works to make it to become a stage production.
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Mina Loy (1882 – 1966)
Mina Loy was an English-born poet, playwright, and artist. Light years ahead of her time, she was lauded by her peers for her dense analyses of the female experience in early twentieth-century Western society. She was associated with other great minds and literary innovators of her time, like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Beach, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and others.
Feminist Manifesto, which is now considered Loy’s greatest work, wasn’t published until decades after her death. In this 1914 piece, Loy vehemently lays out her belief that women needed to assert their own special brand of selfhood because they had so long been relegated to subsuming their personalities and desires to those of men.
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Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972)
Marianne Moore was a poet associated with the American Modernist movement. Her poetry was notable for its wit, irony, and use of syllabic verse. She was also a respected translator.
Marianne’s poetry was first published in spring 1915 in The Egoist and Poetry magazines. Poetry, her first book of poems, was published in 1921 by her former classmate, Hilda Doolittle (H.D), without Marianne’s knowledge. Observations, her second book of poetry, was published in 1924 and won the Dial Award that same year.
“The Octopus,” an exploration of Mt. Rainier that is now regarded as one of Marianne’s finest poems, was included in that publication. The volume also included “Marriage,” a poem written in free verse that featured quotations.
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Dorothy Richardson (1873 – 1957)
Dorothy Richardson was best known for her Pilgrimage novels, which were precursors to and champions of the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique.
Often unmentioned in discussions about Modernism and stylistic conventions for the period, Pilgrimage is Richardson’s magnum opus. It is comprised of thirteen novels that she considered to be chapters. Beginning with Pointed Roofs and ending with March Moonlight, the Pilgrimage novels all follow the life of Miriam Henderson and her quotidian responsibilities. Today, her novels are still in print, but not in all countries.
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Mazo de la Roche (1879 – 1961)
Known for her Jalna series, which spans sixteen books, four of Canadian writer Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna novels graced the top ten bestsellers lists in the 1900s: Jalna (1927), Jalna (1928), Finch’s Fortune (1931), and The Master of Jalna (1933).
The Library of Congress holds that the Jalna series contains “the story of the Canadian Whiteoak family from 1854 to 1954, although each of the novels can also be enjoyed as an independent story.” Despite the changes throughout the century, the Whiteoaks maintain a sense of stasis, as “the manor house and its rich surrounding farmland known as ‘Jalna’” never changes in some ways.
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May Sinclair (1863 – 1946)
At the time when May Sinclair’s writing was featured in The Egoist, she was a well-known literary critic and novelist. In The Egoist, she reviewed Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, above, coining the now-popular term “stream-of-consciousness,” which Richardson detested.
Sinclair was on cordial terms with the three leading Imagist revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and H.D. Her novel, The Three Sisters, parallels the lives of the Brontë sisters in some respects, while Mary Olivier: A Life is mostly known for being featured in The Little Review alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses (rather than for its content).
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Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)
Gertrude Stein, American-born author, poet, and art collector, is considered one of the most significant modernist writers of the early twentieth century. She lived as an expat in Paris for most of her adult life with her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Stein also wrote plays, operas, and gave many lectures.
Though some consider her writing incoherent or absurd, others view it as a singular voice from the era of literary modernism.
The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925) is her most weighty work, It this 900-plus-page modernist novel she presents a history of American life in excruciating detail through the accounts of the fictional Hersland and Dehning family. She disrupts the novelistic space with meditations on the process of writing.
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Contributed by Francesca Mancino
Francesca Mancino is a Master’s in English student at Case Western Reserve University. After this degree, she hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in English, where she can study Lost Generation literature and culture, along with Modernist female writers that have strayed from the canon. Find more of her writing at Lost Modernists.
This was very inspiring but the first picture of Dorothy Richardson was actually Margaret Anderson.
Oh wow, you’re right … not sure how that happened. I’ve corrected that, thanks for pointing it out.