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.”