Title:
The Open Window
Date of Publication:
Oct. 1910 – Sept. 1911
Place of Publication:
London, England
Frequency of Publication:
Monthly
Circulation:
Unknown
Publisher:
Locke Ellis, 18, Whitcomb Street, London, Western Central (W.C.)
Physical Description:
Back and front covers were dark blue/navy cardboard with blue board paper spines; pages were printed on cream cardboard. 6 inches x 4 ½ inches
Price:
7 shillings and sixpence per year
Editor:
Vivian Locke Ellis
Associate Editor(s):
Stephen Reynolds (Contributing Editor)
Harold Child (Contributing Editor)
Libraries with Original Issues:
Bodleian Library, British Library, Cambridge University Library, Harvard University Library, University of Texas, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yale University Library.
PDF version of Volume II, No. 7 available online at the Modernist Magazines Project, directed by Professor Peter Brooker of the University of Sussex and Professor Andrew Thacker of De Montfort University.
The Open Window was an illustrated magazine published monthly in the West Central district of London. The first volume began in October 1910, and it was issued monthly for six months. The second volume began with number seven of the magazine, which was published in April 1911. The monthly ran for the next five months and published a total of twelve numbers to round out the two volumes. Although the magazine experienced a short life, it influenced other similar publications to become places where the voices of young artists and writers could be heard.
In The Open Window the contributions selected by Editor Locke Ellis “spring out of an experience of life. At their best [these works] are limpid, sure and tranquil, and have what is the first and last object and achievement of style—[the reader] entirely forgets the skills and delicacy” of these writers and contributors in midst of “the delight of the beauty [The Open Window] expresses” as a whole (Locke Ellis, 1918: 37).
Although Lock Ellis included no manifesto within his magazine, he proclaimed the magazine as a work of “elegance, grace, and classical feel” that “contains true elegance and distinction” (Zaturenska 178). Through his magazine, Locke Ellis transcends “the merely conventional or pretty theme” that becomes the magazine’s “own identity, and it seems very beautiful” (180).
Maxwell Armfield
“The Open Window”
“The End of the Wood”
Gilbert Cannan
“In the Depths”
E. F. Carritt
“Hydrolutry”
Harold Child
“The Man of Forty”
Louis Davis
“The Angel of the Christmas Tree”
Vivian Locke Ellis
“The Old Herdsman”
Robin Flower
“The Poems of John of Dorsington”
Keith Henderson
“Zoo”
“Behemoth in Hell”
Charles John Holmes
“Bude Cliffs”
St. John Lucas
“Three Grotesques”
Katherine Mansfield
“A Fairy Story”
Leslie Murray
“Study of a Dancer”
Stephen Reynolds
“Silly Saltie”
Auguste Rodin
“Projet de Marbre”
Noel Rooke
“Woodcut”
Huge de Sélincourt
“The Splendid Fact”
Claude Shepperson
“The Lark”
A. H. Smith
“The Background of Thought”
James Stephens
“Little Lady”
“Holiday”
Geoffrey Whitworth
“A Palimpest”
Jack B. Yeats
“A Solid Man”
Beryl de Zoete
“Adagio”
Carswell, John. Lives and Letters: A.R. Orage, Katherine Mansfield, Beatrice Hastings, John Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky – 1906-1957. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1978.
Ellis, Vivian Locke. An Elegy. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1914.
–––. The Venturers and Other Poems. Adelphi, London: Vivian Locke Ellis, 1913.
–––. “Vivian Locke Ellis.” Twelve Poets: A Miscellany of New Verse. Ed. Edward Thomas. London: Selwyn and Blount, 1918. 36-48.
Kemp, Sandra. Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction 1900-12: New Voices in the Age of Uncertainty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Lapidge, Michael, ed. Interpreters of Early Medieval Britain. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2002.
Sullivan, Alvin. British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913: Historical Guides to the World’s Periodicals and Newspapers. Vol. 3. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984.
Zaturenska, Marya. “Tradition Isn’t Convention.” Poetry 73.3 (1948): 177-80.
“The Open Window” compiled by Natalie Atabek (Class of ’13, Davidson College)