The first biography of the enigmatic dadaist known as "the Baroness"—Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) is considered by many to be the first American dadaist as well as the mother of dada. An innovator in poetic form and an early creator of junk sculpture, "the Baroness" was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances. Some thought her merely crazed, others thought her a genius. The editor Margaret Anderson called her "perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary." Yet despite her great notoriety and influence, until recently her story and work have been little known outside the circle of modernist scholars.

In Baroness Elsa, Irene Gammel traces the extraordinary life and work of this daring woman, viewing her in the context of female dada and the historical battles fought by women in the early twentieth century. Striding through the streets of Berlin, Munich, New York, and Paris wearing such adornments as a tomato-soup can bra, teaspoon earrings, and black lipstick, the Baroness erased the boundaries between life and art, between the everyday and the outrageous, between the creative and the dangerous. Her art objects were precursors to dada objects of the teens and twenties, her sound and visual poetry were far more daring than those of the male modernists of her time, and her performances prefigured feminist body art and performance art by nearly half a century.

Irene Gammel holds a Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture at Ryerson University in Toronto, where she is also the Director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center dedicated to the study of modern women writers. The author and editor of 13 books, Gammel is the curator of the exhibit Anne of Green Gables: A Literary Icon at 100. Together with Suzanne Zelazo she has co-edited Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (2010) and Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto by Florine Stettheimer (BookThug, 2010). Gammel divides her time between Toronto and Sackville, New Brunswick.

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Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa mounts an enthusiastic case for her as one of the great unsung modernists.—Village Voice—

The Baroness could not have asked for a more thoughtful and engaged monument than Gammel's book.

—The New York Times Book Review—