Dora Marsden was born March 5, 1882 in Yorkshire, England. Her family was relatively poor, and her father and eldest brother emigrated to the US in 1890 to seek better economic fortunes. But Marsden and her mother stayed in England. She was able to attend school, mostly thanks to an 1870 English law that provided elementary education for all children starting at age 5.
By the time she was 13, Marsden was working as a tutor for other students, and qualified for a scholarship to college. She graduated in 1903 and became a schoolteacher. In her spare time, Marsden became an activist in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a militant organization working for women’s suffrage in the UK. She was arrested several times, most notably for heckling Winston Churchill during a speech (this was well before Churchill became Prime Minister).
She left her teaching career in 1909 to work in the WSPU as an administrator. That only lasted a couple of years, though, because she was too radical even for the radical organization. She founded The Freewoman in 1911, a journal publishing dissenting articles and essays by women. The Freewoman only published for about a year, but Marsden started a new one in 1913: The New Freewoman. That one only stayed in operation for about six months, but her third attempt, The Egoist, lasted for five years.
The Egoist gets its title from “egoism,” which was a branch of philosophy founded by Max Stirner. It focused on individualism, and was anarchic in the sense that it advocated that political states be abolished. It wasn’t too happy about society in general, either.
The Egoist is still regarded as “England’s most important Modernist periodical.” It wasn’t just a political magazine; it was also a literary journal that published works by D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot, who was an assistant editor in 1917. It was originally published every two weeks, when Marsden herself was the editor, but by its second year had become a monthly. Marsden turned the editorial duties over to others, and remained as the lead writer and contributor.
Her journals were never widely popular, and in particular The Egoist declined in circulation over its span — it initially had thousands of subscribers, but by 1919 it was down to just 400, and Marsden closed it down. Her campaign for women’s suffrage succeeded in 1918 (partly) and in 1928 (completely), but Marsden herself grew more and more depressed over the relatively poor reception of her other work, both literary and philosophical. Her mother passed away in 1935, and Marsden suffered a psychological breakdown. She was diagnosed with severe depression, and was admitted to the Crichton Royal Hospital, where she lived for the rest of her life. Her biography, Dora Marsdan: A Brave and Beautiful Spirit, was published in 2019.
