Baroness Elsa

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

The woman known as The Baroness in Greenwich Village in the 1910s and
1920s was a striking figure, an experimental poet, artist, and model who
loved to wear bizarre costumes and sometimes a shaved head.

The autobiography of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, which
covers the early part of her life before she reached New York, was
discovered only recently among the Djuna Barnes papers in the University
of Maryland. After the Baroness returned to Europe in the mid-1920s,
Djuna planned to publish a book of her friend’s poetry and asked Elsa
for a memoir to be included in the book. The memoir was mailed among
letters to Djuna, written in broken but colorful English.

The Baroness had all the necessary attributes for an artistic
career—a hunger for experience, a life sustained on emotion, a sharp
eye for the idiocy of human behavior (including her own). But she was
born in Germany in 1872 and she thought that success came through
men—she had the perpetual fantasy of some man who would support her
and worship her as was her due. While she is often very funny when
writing of her sexual adventures, she inadvertently gives a touching
picture of the romantic adolescent drifting through a myriad of sexually
inadequate and close-fisted lovers.

The man who gave her her first orgasm was her second husband, a German
writer named Felix Paul Greve who later became a Canadian writer known
as Frederick Philip Grove. For students of Canadian literature, the
Baroness’s account of the time she spent with Grove in or out of
marriage may be the most interesting part of her story. For students of
feminism, her evolution into American-style awareness of women’s
strength is sadly mixed with her own failures. For art students, we can
only be sorry that her story does not cover the New York years, referred
to in the introduction, when she finally turned to creating her own art
and became part of the Dada movement.