Jane Heap
Little Review reunion, with Jane Heap,Mina Loy, andEzra Pound in Paris (1921)
Born	(1883-11-01)November 1, 1883 Topeka, Kansas
Died	June 18, 1964(1964-06-18) (aged 80)
Occupation	Publisher
Known for	Promotion of literary modernism

Jane Heap (November 1, 1883 – June 18, 1964) was an Americanpublisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literarymodernism. Together withMargaret Anderson, her friend and business partner (who for some years was also her lover), she edited the celebrated literary magazineThe Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of modern American,English andIrish 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."^[1]

Heap was born inTopeka, Kansas, where her father was the warden of the local mental asylum. Her grandmother was related toSámi living above the Arctic Circle. After completing her high school education, she moved toChicago, where she enrolled in theArt Institute of Chicago, and continued to take night school classes there even after she became an art teacher at theLewis Institute.

It was while working at the Lewis Institute, in 1908, that she first met Florence Reynolds, a student and the daughter of a prosperous Chicago businessman. Reynolds and Heap became lovers, in 1910 travelling together to Germany, where Heap studied tapestry weaving. They remained friends throughout their lives, although they often lived apart, and despite the fact that Heap formed romantic attachments with many other women. From the late 1930s, Heap became the companion of the founding editor of BritishVogue and head designer at Worth LondonElspeth Champcommunal.^[2][3]

In 1912, Heap helped foundMaurice Browne'sChicago Little Theatre, an influentialavant-garde theatre group presenting the works ofChekhov,Strindberg andIbsen and other contemporary works.

In 1916, Heap metMargaret C. Anderson, and soon joined her as co-editor of the groundbreaking Modernist magazine,The Little Review. Although her work in the published magazine was relatively low profile (she signed her pieces simply "jh"), she was a bold and creative force behind the scenes.^[4]

In 1917, Anderson and Heap movedThe Little Review to New York. With the help of poet and criticEzra Pound, who acted as their foreign editor in London,The Little Review published some of the most influential new writers in the English language, includingHart Crane,T. S. Eliot,Ernest Hemingway,James Joyce, Pound himself, andWilliam Butler Yeats. The magazine's most published poet was New York dadaistBaroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, with whom Heap became friends on the basis of their shared confrontational feminist and artistic agendas.^[5] Other notable contributors includedSherwood Anderson,André Breton,Jean Cocteau,Malcolm Cowley,Marcel Duchamp,Ford Madox Ford,Emma Goldman,Vachel Lindsay,Amy Lowell,Francis Picabia,Carl Sandburg,Gertrude Stein,Wallace Stevens,Arthur Waley, andWilliam Carlos Williams. Even so, however, they once published an issue with 12 blank pages to protest the temporary lack of exciting new works.

In March 1918, Ezra Pound sent Heap and Anderson the opening chapters of James Joyce'sUlysses, whichThe Little Review serialized until 1920, when theU.S. Post Office seized and burned four issues of the magazine and convicted Anderson and Heap on obscenity charges. Although the obscenity trial was ostensibly aboutUlysses,Irene Gammel argues thatThe Little Review came under attack for its overall subversive tone and, in particular, its publication of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's sexually explicit poetry and outspoken defense of Joyce.^[6] The Baroness paid tribute to Jane Heap's combative spirit in her poem "To Home," which is dedicated to "Fieldadmarshmiralshall/ J.H./ Of Dreadnaught:/ T.L.R."^[7] At their 1921 trial, they were fined $100 and forced to discontinue the serialization. Following the trial, Heap became the main editor of the magazine, taking over from Anderson, and introducing brightly coloured covers and experimental poetry fromsurrealists andDadaists.^[8]

Heap metG. I. Gurdjieff during his 1924 visit to New York, and was so impressed with his philosophy that she set up a Gurdjieff study group at her apartment inGreenwich Village. In 1925, she moved to Paris, to study at Gurdjieff'sInstitute for the Harmonious Development of Man, where Margaret Anderson had moved the previous year alongside her new lover, sopranoGeorgette Leblanc. Although they now lived separately, Heap and Anderson continued to work together as co-editors ofThe Little Review until deciding to close the magazine in 1929. Heap also at this time adopted Anderson's two nephews, after Anderson's sister had had a nervous breakdown, and Anderson herself had shown no interest in becoming a foster mother.

Heap established a Paris Gurdjieff study group in 1927, which continued to grow in popularity through the early 1930s, whenKathryn Hulme (author ofThe Nun's Story) and journalistSolita Solano (Sarah Wilkinson) joined the group. This developed into an all-women Gurdjieff study group known as "the Rope", taught jointly by Heap and by Gurdjieff himself.

In 1935, Gurdjieff sent Heap to London to set up a new study group. She would remain in London for the rest of her life, including throughoutThe Blitz. Her study group became very popular with certain sections of the London avant-garde, and after the war its students included the future theatre producer and director,Peter Brook. Heap also became friends with the concert pianist and composerHelen Perkin during this period.^[9]

Apart from herLittle 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 fromdiabetes 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:^[10]

• 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.

In 2006 Heap andMargaret Anderson were inducted into theChicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.^[11]

• Barnet, Andrea (2004).All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913–1930. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.ISBN 1-56512-381-6.

• Dear Tiny Heart: The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds, edited by Holly A. Baggett, (New York University Press., 1999)

• Potted biography of Jane Heap by Rob Baker for the Gurdjieff International Review
• Florence Reynolds collection related to Jane Heap and The Little Review atSpecial Collections, University of Delaware Library

• 1883 births
• 1964 deaths
• People from Topeka, Kansas
• Businesspeople from Chicago
• School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni
• Illinois Institute of Technology faculty
• American magazine publishers (people)
• American magazine editors
• American women magazine editors
• Fourth Way
• Modernism
• American lesbians
• LGBTQ people from Kansas
• Diabetes-related deaths
• Students of George Gurdjieff

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