Jane Heap
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Jane Heap (November 1, 1883 – June 18, 1964) was an American publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner (who for some years was also her lover), she edited the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. Heap herself has been called "one of the most neglected contributors to the transmission of modernism between America and Europe during the early twentieth century."
Work
Apart from her Little Review work, Heap never in her lifetime published an account of her ideas, although both Hulme and Anderson published collections of memoirs, and particularly their memories of working with Gurdjieff. After Heap's death from diabetes in 1964, former students put together a collection of her aphorisms (both her own and Gurdjieff's) and, in 1983, some notes reflecting her expression of some of the key Gurdjieff ideas. Some of her aphorisms are given below:
- Never oppose someone with the same center, always offer another one.
- Do not sit too long in the same place.
- You are responsible for what you have understood.
- Little steps for little feet.
- Suppress natural reaction and pay for it later.
- We never refuse in the Work.
- Animals are nature's experiments and embody all the emotions.
- A cat is all essence. Essence remembers.
- All that falls from the wagon is lost.
Bibliography
- Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds, edited by Holly A. Baggett, (New York University Press., 1999)