Published in the 1927 issue of Eugene Jolas's avant-garde journal transition, Emily Holmes Coleman's poem, “The Liberator,” reads like a modern woman's call to arms. Planning her escape from an asylum that could just as easily be read as a prison and preparing her female compatriots for an act of rebellion, the speaker rises like a phoenix from its ashes—“I am powerful now.” The poem closes with the image of women dancing the ecstasy of their release:

Modernist in its cinematic presentation of fragmented bodies and space, surrealist in its syntactically correct but semantically unusual verbal combinations, its obscure referents, and its hallucinatory sense of reality—beds stare, eyes leap—“The Liberator” can be read as anticipating the aesthetic-political issues circulating in Coleman's only published novel, The Shutter of Snow, which she began writing in 1927 and finished in 1929. After being rejected by several publishers, including the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, The Shutter of Snow was finally accepted for publication by Routledge and appeared both in America and England in 1930.

Coleman's image of women dancing in the snow, one that haunts her novel as well, anticipates the exuberant dance choreographed by Virginia Woolf towards the end of her feminist political manifesto, Three Guineas (1938). There, you may recall, as she proffers her second guinea, Woolf cries: “And let the daughters of uneducated women dance round the new house, the poor house…and let them sing, ‘We have done with war! We have done with tyranny!’…Light up the windows of the new house, daughters! Let them blaze” (100). Armed with indignation, petrol, matches, and four teachers—poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom—from whom she says they must refuse to separate, Woolf 's dancing daughters perform a revolutionary counterpoint to what she refers to as that other “ring, the vicious circle, the dance round and round the mulberry tree, the poison tree of intellectual harlotry” (117). As Three Guineas so powerfully details, this “vicious circle,” the dance round and round of patriarchy, militancy, and nationalism, conjures only the deadly tyranny of the same.