Jane Eldridge Miller

In the memoirs, autobiographies and biographies of those who were central to the development of Modernism, Mina Loy turns up with a Zelig-like ubiquity. She studied art in Munich at the same time as Kandinsky and Klee. Her paintings were exhibited in the 1905 Salon d’Automne in which the first Fauvist works were shown. While living in Florence, she became friends with Gertrude Stein and Mabel Dodge, and had affairs with Marinetti and Papini. She spent the First World War in New York as part of Walter Arensberg’s circle, which included Duchamp, Picabia, Varèse, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. She sketched Freud in Vienna and lived among the avant garde in postwar Berlin. In the Twenties, when American expatriates flocked to Paris, Loy was there too.

To read the letters of Dorothy Richardson is to become exhausted, vicariously, by the ‘non-stop housewifery’ which consumed her days. From 1918 until 1939, Richardson and her husband moved three times a year. Every autumn, they settled in a primitive rented cottage in Cornwall, where Richardson was responsible for shopping, cooking and cleaning, as well as for her own and her husband’s sizeable correspondence. In the spring, Richardson would pack up their belongings and they would move to nearby lodgings for a few months, only to pack up again, this time to live in London for the summer, where Richardson’s domestic duties lessened but her social ones increased, as she and her husband met friends and associates they were unable to see the rest of the year. Then in the autumn, Richardson prepared their London rooms for winter tenants, and they returned to Cornwall.