The introduction opens with a reading of a passage from a 1914 letter by D. H. Lawrence to establish three major facets of the book’s argument: (1) for many modernists, cross-sex collaboration offered a practical way of using gender difference as a source of creative energy; (2) both Lawrence and many of his contemporaries viewed shared creative activity between women and men as deeply and positively subversive; and (3) rather than envisioning cross-sex collaboration as a harmonious synthesis of opposites, Lawrence revels in the prospect of its leading to unresolvable gender conflict. It then introduces my concept of the discord aesthetic, which refers to the modernists’ tendency to use conflict between the sexes as a creative catalyst and infuse the texts they made together with evidence of that conflict; situates my argument with respect to prior scholarship on the intersections between modernism, gender, and literary couplings; and acknowledges my debt to the textual scholarship methodology of reading the linguistic and material dimensions of texts as working together to create meaning.

Chapter 5 considers the implications of modernist efforts to rethink notions of gender and creative autonomy for our understanding of genius. Although some writers and artists imagined androgyny as something a man and woman could achieve together, the same does not appear to have been true of genius, which remains for the modernists a phenomenon exhibited or embodied by individuals. I contend that the modernists’ own practice of cross-sex collaboration challenges this conception, as evidenced by two examples: the play Cathleen ni Houlihan, by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and the novel Under the Volcano, written by Malcolm Lowry with significant input from his second wife, Margerie Bonner Lowry. Neither of these masterpieces could have been realized by just one of its coauthors alone, yet no member of either couple thought of that couple itself as “a genius.” This limitation on the conception of genius came with significant personal costs and misrepresents the true nature of the writers’ powerful displays of joint creativity. Genius, I conclude, is not solely the provenance of individuals but an invaluable human capacity that can draw strength from both male and female participation.

Chapter 4 examines three instances where the juxtaposition of a man’s and a woman’s textual contributions aims to satisfy the modernist desire for androgyny. W. B. Yeats’s interest in androgyny is expressed through iconography that the artist Althea Gyles employed in her designs for the covers of his books The Secret Rose (1897) and Poems (1899), but it is also embodied by the material texts of those books themselves, which bring together a man’s words with a woman’s images. A similar collaborative dynamic is apparent in Marianne Moore’s 1936 volume The Pangolin and Other Verse, where poems that explore seemingly impossible meetings of difference work together with illustrations by the male artist George Plank to convey an androgynous vision. The chapter concludes by turning to the modernist writer most closely associated with androgyny, Virginia Woolf. Drawing on the famous image from A Room of One’s Own of a man and woman stepping into a taxi that spurs Woolf to write of the androgynous mind, I argue that Woolf’s dialogic “meeting” with her husband Leonard in their 1917 Hogarth Press volume Two Stories reflects her desire to achieve androgyny through cross-sex collaboration.

Chapter 2 looks at the major cross-sex collaborations of D. H. Lawrence, who, along with W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore, serves as one of three “serial collaborators” at the heart of this study who worked with multiple partners of the opposite sex throughout their careers. It argues that collaboration with women was central to Lawrence’s creative process. His preservation of competing authorial voices in the first published version of his early short story “Goose Fair,” which he wrote with his one-time fiancée Louie Burrows, offers new insight into how he incorporated Jessie Chambers’s editorial suggestions and textual contributions in shaping key parts of his final manuscript for Sons and Lovers. The dynamic of these collaborations, in turn, informs my reading at the end of the chapter of his little-known 1924 novel The Boy in the Bush, coauthored with the Australian writer Mollie Skinner. Lawrence’s commitment to utilizing his real-life creative disagreements with women to enhance the narrative dialogism of his works exemplifies how the discord aesthetic served to animate modernist texts.

Chapter 1 provides historical context for the advent of cross-sex collaboration as a widespread modernist practice by examining the efforts of several writers and intellectuals between 1885 and 1908 to theorize the gendered nature of creativity or imagine mutually satisfying, socially transformative ways in which men and women might work together outside of traditional marriage. Three recurring subjects of concern emerge that shape the discourse regarding relations between the sexes at the time: marriage, androgyny, and genius. All three of these ideas, I argue, promise to fulfill the age-old fantasy of allowing individuals to recapture a lost state of primordial wholeness by uniting two opposite natures as one. The historical analysis in this chapter also provides a frame for examining two co-signed, late-nineteenth-century works that exemplify how some writers began to view cross-sex collaboration as ideally suited for exploring one or more of the subjects of marriage, androgyny, and genius: Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling’s 1886 pamphlet The Woman Question, and Thomas Hardy and Florence Henniker’s 1894 short story “The Spectre of the Real.”

Chapter 3 examines the discord aesthetic in three cross-sex collaborations that sought to critique, invigorate, or reconfigure marriage. Violet Hunt and Ford Madox Ford in their 1913 travel book The Desirable Alien model an innovative conjugal dynamic that privileges articulations of disagreement and destabilizes fixed gender roles by placing the writers’ distinct textual contributions in unresolved dialogue. I then read a similar attempt to re-conceptualize marriage as a shared quest to negotiate conflict without eradicating it as central to W. B. Yeats and George Yeats’s practice of automatic writing in the early years of their marriage. Finally, I turn from these heterosexual couples to consider the collaboration between Marianne Moore, a celibate unmarried woman, and her gay male friend Monroe Wheeler on the publication of her poem “Marriage” as the third and final chapbook in Wheeler’s Manikin series in 1923. Far from reinforcing traditional gender roles and hierarchies, these examples show how cross-sex collaboration might serve as the basis for truly innovative marriages based on a couple’s shared commitment to mutual empowerment and gender flexibility.