British Mothers Research Articles

Combining Work and Family in Two Welfare State Contexts: A Discourse Analytical Perspective

AbstractThis paper describes and compares the way in which British and Finnish mothers of dual‐career families construct discourses on the work and family interplay. Through this comparison, the paper also considers the presence or visibility of larger welfare state frameworks at the level of the discourse of mothers. The paper argues that, despite the many structural and ideological differences between the British and the Finnish welfare states, mothers living in them often construct their daily lives by using similar discursive frameworks. These discourses are, however, contextualized and interpreted differently. This level of contextualization and interpretation of the discourses is argued to be the stage where the structures and gender constructs of welfare states step in.

Using the Parental Stressor Scale: Nicu with a British sample of mothers of moderate risk preterm infants

This paper presents an exploration of the validity of the Parental Stressor Scale: NICU [Miles et al. (1993) Parental Stressor Scale: NICU, Nursing Research, 42, 148-152] with a sample of British mothers of moderate risk preterm infants. Forty mothers were recruited to the main study (seven families declined). The PSS: NICU was completed within 48-96 hours of delivery. Subscales measuring stress from 'sights and sounds', 'appearance and behaviour of infant' and 'relationship with infant' show a range of responses and show good internal consistency. Items relating to 'staff behaviours and communication' were reported to be 'not applicable'. Relationships with infant and maternal variables are explored. In the light of other studies, the results suggest the importance of timing in measuring sources of stress for parents. The PSS: NICU could be improved by the addition/revision of items, particularly in the staff behaviour and communication subscale. New subscale development relating to birth experience, practical hassles and time pressures, and maternal role transition is suggested.

Three facial expressions mothers direct to their infants

AbstractMothers modify both their voices and their faces when interacting with infants. Although considerable work has detailed the modifications in the voice, less is known about those in the face. In this paper, three specific types of infant‐directed (ID) facial expressions were identified in videotapes of 10 English‐ and 10 Chinese‐speaking mothers interacting with infants aged 4–7 months. Four measures were taken to examine the form and meaning of these ID facial expressions. In Measure one, 32 undergraduates easily differentiated the three identified facial expression types. In Measure two, the muscle movement of each type were described through Ekman and Friesen's facial action coding system (FACS). In Measure three, 35 mothers and 40 undergraduates provided different emotional descriptions and communicative messages for each type. In Measure four, rank correlations were conducted to identify the FACS units most indicative of each facial expression type. These four measures confirmed the appearance of three expression types in both Chinese and English mothers, the involvement of unique muscle movements in these expression types in comparison to adult‐directed expressions which have been described, and the expression of distinct and consistent emotional messages. The meaning and importance of these expressions to mother‐infant interactions are discussed, and directions for future research are identified. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Socialization Goals, Parenting Practices, and Peer Competence in Chinese and English Preschoolers

This cross-cultural study examines relations between parents' socialization goals and child-rearing practices, as well as their impact upon peer competence during early childhood. Participants were sixty-three Hong Kong-Chinese mothers, sixty-one English mothers and their preschool-aged children. Mothers completed questionnaires measuring socialization goals and practices. Their children took part in sociometric interviews. Results indicate both similarities and differences in child-rearing practices and in their impact on children's peer competence across the two cultures. Among both Hong Kong and English mothers, significant correlations were found between (i) socialization towards Filial Piety and Authoritarian practices, and (ii) valuing Socio-emotional Development and Authoritative Parenting. However, Chinese mothers reported stronger emphasis on socialization for Academic Achievement and Filial Piety, as well as greater use of Authoritarian Parenting practices, than English mothers. The use of Authoritarian practices among English mothers was, in accordance with past research, negatively correlated with peer competence among preschoolers. Findings highlight the influence of cultural values upon child socialization and upon the way that these values are translated into practice.

Attitudes To and Knowledge of CAMHS: Differences Between Pakistani and White British Mothers.

Research suggests that there are differences in the problems that are referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) by White British and Asian families as well as differences in how these services are accessed. There is a need for more information about how different ethnic communities perceive and access CAMH services. White British or Pakistani mothers of children between 0-20 years at an urban health centre were invited to complete a study-specific questionnaire written in English (with verbal translation provided when needed). Data were collected on awareness and experience of, and willingness to use CAMH services; severity of problems before referral is considered and additional factors that influence service use. In comparison to White British mothers, Pakistani mothers were found to be less likely to consider a referral for problems judged as mild or moderate. There was no difference for severe problems. Qualitative factors that would enhance the use of CAMH services by Pakistani mothers include the availability of culture and gender matched therapists, and better access to translation facilities. The study highlights service needs and expectations of mothers of Pakistani origin, and emphasises the need for relevant, inclusive and culturally sensitive services.

Family functioning in anorexia nervosa: British and Italian mothers' perceptions

This study tested the hypothesis that cultural differences would influence individuals' perceptions of family functioning. Mothers of British and Italian children and adolescents with anorexia nervosa completed the Family Assessment Device (FAD). British mothers perceived their families' communication and role definition as less healthy than did the Italian mothers. In contrast, the Italians perceived their families' behavior control methods as less healthy than did the British mothers. The findings might be explained by differences between British and Italian interpretations of the role of “family,” particularly giving the British emphasis on independence and the Italian emphasis on family life. It is suggested that these culturally divergent attitudes towards family life might have different influences on anorexia nervosa. Finally, implications for family therapy are discussed, taking into account those characteristics that are more relevant for each cultural group.

Chapter 8 The Skiddaw graptolites

Abstract When I was at Cambridge in the 1950s the Professor of Geology was Oliver Bulman (1902-1974) who lectured in palaeontology. He was a quiet man, with a quiet sort of interest: graptolites. He did not fraternize much with the undergraduates, but was regarded as a great authority on his subject. He was a wonderful artist, and when we got to dinosaurs in the syllabus his blackboard drawings drew spontaneous applause from the students. I never got to know him, but I do recall that when we were on a field excursion in South Wales a student found some nodules with three-dimensional pyritized graptolites therein. This was an exciting find. A telegram was sent to Cambridge and Bulman was on the next train to Pembrokeshire and soon arrived, full of excitement. He took away the specimens, and I suppose they were eventually described somewhere. I never saw the paper. Also at Cambridge at that time was a deaf old lady, Dr Gertrude Elles, whose work provides one of the main foci for the present chapter. She was reputed to inhabit a room somewhere in the attic, but we never saw her. Born in 1872, she would have been about 84 when I was a student. She died in 1960. However, she too was said to be a great authority on graptolites. From photographs (see Fig. 8.1), Elles was strikingly beautiful when young. 1 Elles was raised in Wimbledon, daughter of a Scottish businessman father and an English mother; and with her Scottish

Abstracts of papers and posters presented at the 2001 Annual Conference of the Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology

The aim of this study is to identify patterns of thinking with regard to childcare for under 2 year olds, amongst mothers. 40 women in two towns of similar demography in Netherlands and England were interviewed, using a semi-structured interview. The discourse analysis method was used for transcripts. Three ideologies were identified, namely the ideology of Good Mother , what young child and the ideology of Female Employment in this day and age . Each of ideologies comprised of 3 to 4 dilemmas mothers are faced with when deciding about childcare, like 'Mother’s Needs versus Child’s Needs’. Dutch mothers seemed to think that it is better to start using childcare when child is as young as possible, whilst English mothers thought opposite. These dilemmas can be seen as part of a wider conflict of women’s (and child’s) needs.

Robert Richard Brooks, BA, BSc, PhD, DSc, FRS

⇓Fig. 113 February 2001 Fig. 1. On 23 January the world lost another legendary figure in geochemistry. Born in Bristol to an English father and French mother, Robert Brooks spent the first 30 years of his life in England. During that period he served in the British army in the Middle East and East Africa, then attended Bristol University from which he received his BSc (Hons) in Chemistry in 1952. After working for a while as an analytical chemist, he moved to South Africa in 1956 and, under the tutorship of Louis Ahrens, received a PhD in Geochemistry from the University of Cape Town in 1960. That same year he took an academic staff position in New Zealand at Massey University in Palmerston North, where he remained based for the rest of his life. During his 40 years at Massey University, he travelled widely and developed an increasingly broad range of interests and expertise on a wide range of subjects. Among his distinctions, Professor …

Universality and specificity in infant-directed speech: Pitch modifications as a function of infant age and sex in a tonal and non-tonal language

The aim of this study was to investigate the prosodic characteristics of infant-directed speech (IDS) to boys and girls in a tonal (Thai) and non-tonal (Australian English) language. Speech was collected from mothers speaking to infants at birth, and 3, 6, 9, and 12 months, and also to another adult. Mean- F 0, pitch range, and utterance slope- F 0 were extracted, and the integrity of the tonal information in Thai investigated. The age trends across the two languages differed for each of these measures but Australian English IDS was generally more exaggerated than Thai IDS. With respect to sex differences, Australian English mothers used higher mean- F 0, pitch range, and more rising utterances for girls than boys, but Thai mothers used more subdued mean- F 0 and more falling utterances for girls than boys. Despite variations in pitch modifications by Thai and Australian English mothers, overall IDS is more exaggerated than adult-directed speech (ADS) in both languages. Furthermore, tonal information in Thai was only slightly less identifiable in Thai IDS than Thai ADS. The universal features and language-specific differences in IDS are discussed in terms of facilitating infant socialization at younger ages, and language acquisition later in infancy.

Child Care Costs and Lone Mothers’ Employment Rates: UK Evidence

The most commonly cited explanations for the low employment rates of British lone mothers are disincentives provided by the benefit system and a lack of suitable jobs or affordable child care. This is the first British study focusing on lone mothers’ employment rates which includes direct measures of child care costs. Using data from the 1989 Lone Parents Survey, we find significant disincentive effects for child care costs, albeit of a smaller magnitude than in some related studies. There are also some novel findings about knowledge of the benefit system, and measures of human capital and financial stability and security.

Narrating Identity & Conflict: History, Geography, and the Nation in Jamal Mahjoub's Portrayal of Modern-Day Sudan

Jamal cosmopolitan and multifaceted figures on the contempor ry Sudanese literary scene. Born in i960 of an English mother and a Sudanese father, Mahjoub lived both in the Sudan and in England before moving to Denmark, where he now resides. His prolific and critically acclaimed literary production has yielded him enough recognition to place him firmly in the footsteps of such pioneers of Sudanese literature as Tayeb Salih, whose writings put Sudan on the map of twentieth-century literature. Indeed, in the time frame of less than a decade, Mahjoub has written four novels Navigation of a Rainmaker (1989), Wings of Dust (1994), In the Hour of Signs (1996), and Carrier (1998) as well as many short stories, including Road Block (1992), The Cartographer's Angel (winner of the Guardian Award in 1993), Hands of Lead, Feet of Clay (1994), and A History of Amnesia (1995), which present a kaleidoscopic and often disturbing vision of the Sudan's turbulent evolution from the midnineteenth

Conflict management of mothers and daughters belonging to individualistic and collectivistic cultural backgrounds: a comparative study

Research on the mother–daughter relationship during adolescence is mostly conducted in Western and European cultures where individualism is stressed. To examine ethnic/cultural differences and similarities in this relationship, 80 dyads of British (white) and Pakistani mothers and their adolescent daughters were studied. On the basis of the theories of cultural variability dimension and conflict face negotiation, it was hypothesized that mothers and daughters from the two cultures would use different styles of handling disagreements/conflicts. That is, Pakistani mothers and daughters would use an avoiding style, whereas British mothers and daughters would use either a dominating or compromising style, to a greater degree. It was also argued that Pakistani daughters and mothers will express more intimacy and relational harmony, will exhibit greater connectedness and mutuality and demonstrate lesser individuality and self-assertion compared to their British counterparts. However, it appeared that both the groups used an avoiding style equally, although the British group used a dominating style more than Pakistani group. As hypothesized, Pakistani mothers and daughters expressed more intimacy, relational harmony, connectedness and mutuality and lesser individuality than British mothers and daughters.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SOCIALIZATION BETWEEN JAPANESE AND ENGLISH PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN

This author conducted a comparative study among the following three sample groups: Japanese mother-child pairs in London, English mother-child pairs in London, Japanese mother-child pairs in Tokyo. By comparing the mother's developmental expectation, child rearing practices and the development of self-regulation in children, this author explored the extent to which mothers in different societies introduce cultural values of interpersonal relationships in raising their children. Research method for this study were 1) the Picture Self-Regulation Test (PSRT) for preschool children, and 2) a questionnaire for the mothers indicating the mothers' acknowledgement of the development of self-regulation in their children, evaluation of their child's behaviour and patterns of feedback. No significant difference was found among three sample groups on the PSRT. In the Mother's Questionnaire, English mothers acknowledged the early development of self-assertion in their children, unlike Japanese mothers in London and Tokyo. There was no significant difference in the mothers' acknowledgment of self-inhibition among the three sample groups. Analysis of feedback of mothers in the three sample groups revealed that English mothers adopted ‘positive and active’ discipline for their children, while Japanese mothers in London and Tokyo adopted ‘receptive’ discipline.

Physical Punishment by Mothers and Fathers in British Homes

The relative extent to which mothers and fathers administer physical punishment sheds light on family relationships, parental roles and, perhaps, the identity of potential abusers. In this study, British mothers (n = 362) and fathers (n = 103) of randomly selected children from 366 two-parent families were interviewed. According to self-reports, the proportions of mothers and fathers who had used physical punishments were similar, as were the frequencies with which they used them. About 50% more mothers than fathers smacked or hit their children weekly or more often, whereas fathers were more prone to restrain or push their children. A (nonsignificantly) higher proportion of fathers than mothers had used severe punishments. Fathers who took an equal share in caretaking used no more frequent or severe physical punishments than did mothers. These findings are compared with those of previous studies and discussed in terms of mothers' and fathers' caretaking and disciplinarian roles in different families.

A case study of an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual dyslexia

We report the case of AS, a 16 year-old English/Japanese bilingual boy, whose reading/writing difficulties are confined to English only. AS was born in Japan to a highly literate Australian father and English mother, and goes to a Japanese selective senior high school in Japan. His spoken language at home is English. AS's reading in logographic Japanese Kanji and syllabic Kana is equivalent to that of Japanese undergraduates or graduates. In contrast, his performance in various reading and writing tests in English as well as tasks involving phonological processing was very poor, even when compared to his Japanese contemporaries. Yet he has no problem with letter names or letter sounds, and his phoneme categorisation is well within the normal range of English native speakers. In order to account for our data that show a clear dissociation between AS's ability to read English and Japanese, we put forward the `hypothesis of granularity and transparency'. It is postulated that any language where orthography-to-phonology mapping is transparent, or even opaque, or any language whose orthographic unit representing sound is coarse (i.e. at a whole character or word level) should not produce a high incidence of developmental phonological dyslexia.

Despised Creatures: The Illusion of Maternal Self-Effacement in Seventeenth-Century Child Loss Poetry

Despised Creatures: The Illusion of Maternal Self-Effacement in Seventeenth-Century Child Loss Poetry Pamela Hammons* Of her there bred A thousand yong ones, which she dayly fed, Sucking vpon her poisonous dugs, each one Of sundry shapes, yet all ill fauored. Spenser, The Faerie Queene 1 I. Miscreating Mothers The cultural context of seventeenth-century England brought women’s physically creative abilities into a potentially dangerous association with their intellectually creative ones, thereby allowing a mother-poet’s agency in writing a poem on child loss to be conflated with her supposed agency in ensuring (or not) the life of her child. The association of a mother’s inappropriate intellectual activity with the death of her child makes writing a poem about that loss paradoxical. 2 Such a bereaved mother-poet encounters a culturally sanctioned opportunity to write a poem—a limited occurrence for a seventeenth-century English woman—but must use that occasion to renounce or disprove any seemingly improper attempt at creative intellectual agency. She may write a poem but must erase herself as poet. This double bind, however, results in some mothers’ composition of poems that resist the literary and social conventions blaming the mother for the death of her child by interrogating, and thereby invigorating, the commonplaces associated with elegies and epitaphs for children. Few members of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society were more likely to be demonized than mothers. 3 Spenser’s Errour and Milton’s Sin frame the period and serve as telling measures of just how monstrous representations of mothers could become. Errour and Sin are not hideous merely because they personify spiritual depravity or because they bring men to their destruction. They are repulsive because they are mothers whose offspring reflect and multiply their evil and [End Page 25] ugliness. 4 As Deborah Willis indicates, Renaissance depictions of witches similarly rely upon the demonization of the mother. 5 In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, witch-like Lady Macbeth invokes hellish powers to replace her mother’s milk with poison and incites Macbeth to murder by claiming that she could kill her own children had she sworn—as has Macbeth to kill Duncan—to do so. 6 In Jacobean pamphlets such as The Wonderful Discovery of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Philippa Flower, peasant women are represented as witches who not only conspired to kill the local nobleman’s children and to render his wife barren, but who confessed to suckling satanic familiars at the very breasts that should nurture children. 7 While one might assume that early modern English mothers were represented as witches to express the degree to which those particular mothers were poor examples of proper maternity, historian Phyllis Mack observes the opposite: a foolproof method for making a horrible figure of any kind more horrific was to make it a mother. “In fact, the most potent image of woman’s spiritual marginality,” Mack asserts, “was not the deviant witch brewing potions or stroking her familiars but the ordinary mother.” A pregnant woman’s interaction with the world around her was believed to be so fragile and so subject to influence that what she saw could shape—and potentially deform—her unborn child. So suspect was the female imagination that, according to Mack, “a prime explanation for the birth of a deformed child was that . . . a woman’s volatile imagination, infused by evil forces, was sufficient to transform the fetus into a monster.” 8 A prominent example of the female imagination’s susceptibility to spiritual misconception is Milton’s depiction in Paradise Lost of Eve’s vulnerability to Satan’s influence when he whispers in her ear to affect her dreams. Ithuriel and Zephon find Satan “Assaying by his devilish art to reach / The organs of her fancy” with which he hopes to “forge / Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams” (PL, 4.801–2, 4.802–3). Milton makes Satan’s first direct assault on the human couple in Paradise an attempt to manipulate Eve’s “fancy”; ultimately, the devil hopes to “raise [in her] . . . inordinate desires / Blown up with high conceits engendering pride” (PL, 4.806–9), as if to impregnate her with the sin of pride itself...

The Letters of Djuna Barnes and Emily Holmes Coleman (1935-1936)

THE LETTERS OF DJUNA BARNES AND EMILY HOLMES COLEMAN (1935-1936) INTRODUCTION Djuna Barnes once said she was the "most famous unknown of the century," though her writing and painting distinguished her, as did her haughty, cape-tossing gestures, auburn hair and acerbic wit. Born in New York in 1892, she grew up in a family that included a charismatic grandmother who was a journalist, salon keeper and theosophist. Her American father was a proponent of free love and her British mother an aspiring poet. When Djuna was five, her father's mistress joined the household, and Djuna's siblings and half-siblings were educated at home, where all the children were encouraged to write daily. The family split up for financial reasons in 1912, and Djuna helped support her mother and brothers by writing for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She was hired to write for the New York Press by novelist, critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten in 1913 and moved to Greenwich Village, where she shared a house with photographer Berenice Abbott, literary critics Malcolm Cowley and Kenneth Burke, Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement and a number of actors and artists. Her circle of friends was formed largely by the Provincetown Players, a theater collective that launched the career of playwright Eugene O'Neill and inspired Barnes to write her own final drama, The Antiphon, many years later. By 1921 she was on her way to Paris to write for McCaWs. These early influences portended a life that could not be ordinary. In Paris, Barnes was at the center of the expatriate group. She knew Man Ray, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marsden Hartley, Sinclair Lewis, William Butler Yeats, Hart Crane, James Joyce, Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein, Constantin Brancusi , Mina Loy and Edmund Wilson, but she was most impressed by the artist Thelma Wood, with whom she lived for eight years. When their relationship foundered in 1929, Barnes began to work with great intent upon Nightwood (1936), the dark and highly wrought modernist novel for which she is best known. Set in Paris and New York, Barnes' novel (which T.S. Eliot likened to an Elizabethan tragedy for its "quality of horror and doom") is the story of five tormented and tormenting The Missouri Review · 105 cosmopolitan characters. Though she resisted self-knowledge, Barnes' work was significantly autobiographical and documents in a poetic style the struggles of an early-twentieth-century woman with the problems of freedom, sexual and otherwise. Her rage at betrayals by her parents and friends generated the tormented characters of the satirical Ryder (1928) and Nightwood. After being rejected by numerous publishers , the latter novel was eventually published by T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber and the following year in America by Harcourt and Brace. Emily Holmes Coleman was instrumental in the publication of Nightwood. Coleman was born in California in 1899, graduated from Wellesley College in 1920 and married in 1921. After the birth of her son in 1924, she spent two months in a mental hospital in upstate New York and later wrote about the experience in her 1930 novel, Shutter of Snow. Her poetry was published in New Statesman and transition, but she was better known for her literary zeal, keen criticism and volatile temperament. Coleman first met Barnes at Deux Magots in 1925 in Paris, where Coleman was society editor for the Chicago Tribune. They met again in 1932 at a rented country estate in England, where they and novelist Antonia White were guests of heiress Peggy Guggenheim. It was here that Barnes wrote much of Nightwood and Coleman kept an as-yet-unpublished diary that assessed Barnes in a way Barnes found too astute to bear. Though the two were judgmental of each other at first, they eventually formed a friendship that deepened after the 1934 death of their mutual friend John Farrar Holms, an erudite Englishman who was also part of their company in the summers of 1932 and 1933. These letters are a small portion of the voluminous correspondence between Barnes and Coleman. We offer them as a sampling of an intimate conversationbetween two American women writers whose significance has been underestimated. The...

The Role of Co-Mothers in Planned Lesbian-Led Families

Summary The present study examined the role of co-parents in children's lives by comparing the role of co-mothers in 15 British lesbian mother families with the role of resident fathers in two different groups of heterosexual families (43 families where the study-child was conceived through donor insemination, and 41 families where the child had been naturally conceived). Birth mothers in all three types of family were administered a semi-structured interview to assess the quality of family relationships. Questionnaire data on stress associated with parenting were obtained from co-mothers and fathers, and the children were administered the Family Relations Test. The results indicated that co-mothers played a more active role in daily caretaking than did most fathers. However, father-child and co-mother-child relationships were found to be equally warm and affectionate in all three groups and no group differences were found for children's scores on the Family Relations Test or co-mothers/fathers’ scores on the Parenting Stress Index.

Forging the dusk of chaos: the modernity of Mina Loy

On Mina Loy Ellen Keck Stauder Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Carolyn Burke. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. Pp. 494. $35.00 The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger Conover. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. Pp. 236. $22.00 For students of modernism, Mina Loy poses, and always has posed, a dilemma of placement on the cultural map. The dilemma is a little like what Alfred Barr must have faced in the case of Brancusi when he made his now infamous chart of cubism and abstract art for the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. 1 Barr found a place for all of the twentieth century artists under the banners of an “-ism,” all that is, except Brancusi, who alone was represented by his name, apparently inassimilable to any other category. As Barr wrote, “Brancusi stands apart. He is the most original and the most important of the near-abstract sculptors but he has never belonged to any group” (116). The same might be said of Loy’s status and her relationships to artistic movements, though with the one caveat that she seems to have been associated with nearly all of the significant art or literary movements of the modernist period—associated with but not defined by these movements. The similarity between Loy and Brancusi is more than skin deep and more than a matter of critical reception, as her remarkable testimonial poem, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” published in the famous “Waste Land” edition of the Dial in November 1922, demonstrates. However, in contrast to Brancusi, whose works are widely known and around whom a considerable body of scholarship exists, Loy’s visibility on the cultural horizon has been eclipsed. While she once was, as Roger Conover puts it, “the Belle of the American Poetry Ball” (xi), she now is nearly forgotten. In 1917, shortly after she arrived in America, Loy was selected as the archetype of the “modern woman” by the New York Evening Sun (Burke 224), yet Loy’s poetry has been out of print for a number of years, she is almost never anthologized and is rarely mentioned in histories of modernism. In addition, her art [End Page 141] has all but disappeared and what remains is nearly all in private hands. Until now there has been no biography and only the beginnings of a body of criticism. Even Loy’s name is not unambiguously known. In my experience, it is not uncommon for people in conversation to ask if I mean Myrna rather than Mina Loy. One of the wonderful revelations of Carolyn Burke’s biography is to discover that there may in fact be a connection between these two renowned beauties. Contrary to what fame might make one expect, influence in this case ran from poetry to popular culture rather than the reverse. The Hollywood actress reportedly took Loy’s name as her own at the suggestion of a “‘wild Russian writer of free verse,’ who surely knew Mina’s reputation” (Burke vi). With the publication of Carolyn Burke’s Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy and Roger Conover’s edition of her poems, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, this situation of neglect and confusion will change dramatically. These two excellent volumes give us both the life and the work; together they will allow critical attention to be directed not simply at recovery but at evaluation. It has long been possible to construct the basic outlines of Loy’s life. She is frequently mentioned in period memoirs and Conover’s earlier edition of her poetry, The Last Lunar Baedeker (Highland Fields, NJ: Jargon Society, 1982) has extensive biographical notes. From these sources one can muster a thumbnail sketch and many tantalizing details of her remarkable life. She was born Mina Lowy in 1882 in England to an English Protestant mother and a Hungarian Jewish father. Against her mother’s wishes, she was allowed to study art first in England and then in Munich and Paris. Loy married the English painter and photographer, Stephen Haweis, in 1903, living with him first in Paris and later in Florence. Together they were active in avant-garde art circles, especially the Salon d’Automne, to which...