Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers

Book excerpt: In Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers, Anna Menyhért 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, Renée Erdős wrote innovatively about women's experience of sexual love. Minka Czóbel wrote modern trauma texts only to pass into literary history branded, as a result of ideological pressure in communist times, as an 'ugly woman'. Ágnes Nemes Nagy, celebrated for her ‘masculine’ poems, felt she must suppress her ‘feminine’ poems. Famous writer’s widow Ilona Harmos Kosztolányi’s autobiographical writing tackles the physical challenges of girls' adolescence, and offers us a woman’s thoughtful Holocaust memoir. Anna Lesznai, émigrée and visual artist, wove together memory and fiction using techniques from patchworking and embroidery.