Little magazines​ : big guns. It is hard to overestimate the high hopes and strong feelings swirling around papers which are small in funds and circulation but large in aspiration. For a time the London Review of Books might have been considered a little magazine: uncertain of its future but clear it wanted to put a spoke in the Falklands War. The Little Review, thought to have originated the category in 1914, simply wanted to reform the literary landscape of the 20th century – and did give it a push. In A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls (Atria, £20), Adam Morgan does a terrific job telling its history and that of its founder, Margaret C. Anderson. The book is heady with Anderson’s velocity of expression; with the dash that fetched her male admirers, including Hemingway, and female lovers, including (perhaps) Emma Goldman; with the zeal that serialised Ulysses and got her taken to court.

Born in 1886 in Indianapolis, she took off in her twenties, handing out carbon copies of her reasons for leaving what she called the ‘criminality’ of wealthy family life. In Chicago she picked up a reviewing job at a religious weekly, hoovering up fifty books a week. The Little Review was born from loneliness, confidence about contacting writers (Scott Fitzgerald refused to write in the first issue), sky-high hopes for the ‘sun and moon’ of criticism. Early issues included discussions of Nietzsche and Emma Goldman’s lectures, alongside windy statements about poetry and an acerbic letter from the editor’s sister. Practical arrangements were ramshackle. Pieces were not proofread. The paper was beige and smelled like cardboard. Anderson didn’t pay contributors, and claimed that no one ever asked why not. It sounds improbable, Morgan says, yet when the LRB started, in 1979, with what was considered measly payment (£100 for 2000 words), I remember only two people turning down work on financial grounds. Amy Lowell offered to pay to be poetry editor of the Little Review.

It’s frustrating that Morgan’s book contains only one adult photograph of Anderson, at 65, in a hat like a pot-holder. Her early startling beauty helped her slice her way in and out of difficulties, melting pockets and hearts: her first backer was the Breeders’ Gazette. She was, she said, ‘extravagantly pretty … like a composite of all the most offensive magazine covers’. She walked to the rhythm of a Kreisler waltz.

Her fluency caught contributors off-guard. For all her gaspings, she could see authors clearly and hit them off: Pound made her feel she was watching an experiment in a behaviourist lab; noting the droop of Joyce’s wrist, she thought him incapable of escaping pain. She could also bat the blokes back. Upton Sinclair pleaded that she stop sending the Little Review: ‘I no longer understand anything in it, so it no longer interests me.’ Anderson replied: ‘Please cease sending me your socialist paper. I understand everything in it, therefore it no longer interests me.’

The event which made the Little Review famous, the serialisation of Ulysses, pivots around the figure of John Quinn, antisemite and inspired collector, who sponsored Pound as the paper’s foreign editor and paid for contributions by Eliot, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. Pound recognised the dangers of publishing Joyce: ‘It might be well to leave gaps,’ he advised Anderson, who, thinking this ‘the most beautiful thing we’ll ever have’, forged on regardless. Quinn not only foresaw difficulties but regarded some of Joyce’s episodes as ‘toilet-room literature’. Nevertheless, when the magazine was charged with obscenity – ‘a danger to the minds of young girls’ – he acted as defence lawyer, nimbly suggesting that the prosecutor’s apoplectic reaction proved that Ulysses was actually an anaphrodisiac. He made the case while revolted by learning that Anderson, despite being ‘a damn attractive young woman’, was one of those ‘damn female rabbits’: ‘The bugger and the Lesbian constantly think in terms of suits and defences.’ He didn’t win, but Anderson got off with a fine. Quinn had instructed her to dress quietly: when she left the court the judge looked at her ‘with tenderness and suffering’.

Quinn, further proof that literary judgment doesn’t necessarily expand the heart, is sharply etched by Morgan, whose book is quick with vignettes. There are enough lovers for a clit-lit series. Here is Anderson’s long-time companion, the bleak and fascinating Jane Heap, who dressed like a chap, was often flat out with depression, occasionally broke into damning print – ‘another man who hasn’t written the great American novel’ – and who, though sceptical about literary essays, did much donkey work on the mag. Anderson said she had her ‘hand on the exact octave that is me’. Here is Gurdjieff, who heaves maddeningly in with gooey eyes, reducing independent women to puddles and slapping them down: he told Anderson her ‘inner animal’ was a tapeworm.

It’s odd that Morgan doesn’t mention Ian Hamilton’s trenchant Little Magazines (1976), in which Anderson comes in for some caustic treatment – ‘shallow and inflamed’. Hamilton proved the incendiary nature of literary periodicals when in 1987 he described his experience of lecturing about them in Australia. Furious letters to the LRB. One in verse. No other subject has evoked such panzer stanzas.