Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers: Renee Erdos, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Minka Czobel, Ilona Harmos Kosztolanyi, Anna Lesznai

In Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers, Anna Menyhert presents the cases of five women writers whose legacy literary criticism has neglected or distorted, thereby depriving succeeding generations of vital cultural memory and inspiration. A best-selling novelist and poet in her time, Renee Erdos wrote innovatively about women’s experience of sexual love. Minka Czobel wrote modern trauma texts only to pass into literary history branded, as a result of ideological pressure in communist times, as an ‘ugly woman’. Agnes Nemes Nagy, celebrated for her ‘masculine’ poems, felt she must suppress her ‘feminine’ poems. Famous writer’s widow Ilona Harmos Kosztolanyi’s autobiographical writing tackles the physical challenges of girls’ adolescence, and offers us a woman’s thoughtful Holocaust memoir. Anna Lesznai, emigree and visual artist, wove together memory and fiction using techniques from patchworking and embroidery.