Beatrice Hastings was born in London but grew up in
Port Elizabeth, South Africa. She was educated in Pevensey, Sussex, near
Hastings, which may have supplied her chosen name. From 1896 to 1899, she attended the
University of Oxford to study literature. In 1907 she met
A. R. Orage, the editor of
The New Age magazine, with whom she embarked on a romantic relationship. Hastings soon began contributing to the magazine and went on to become one of its most prolific contributors, although most of her work appeared under
pseudonyms. These include: Pagan, Alice Morning, A.M.A., E.H., B.L.H., Beatrice Tina, Cynicus, Robert a Field, T.K.L., D. Triformis, Edward Stafford, S. Robert West, V.M., G. Whiz, J. Wilson, Annette Doorly, Hastings Lloyd, Mrs. Malaprop, and T.W. One of Hastings' greatest talents was parody, and she composed parodies of many her contemporaries, including
Ezra Pound,
Filippo Marinetti, and
H. G. Wells. Hastings was also outspoken in her feminist views and
The New Age correspondence section provided the space in which she developed many of the ideas which would inform her 1909 feminist tract, ''Woman's Worst Enemy: Woman''. In 1914 Hastings moved to Paris and became a figure in bohemian circles due to her friendship with
Max Jacob. She shared an apartment in
Montparnasse with
Amedeo Modigliani and became a model for 14 of his paintings, including his 1916
Seated Nude. Another friend was adventure novelist
Charles Beadle, with whom she had several things in common. He grew up in Hackney, spent time in South Africa (participating in the Boer War as a member of the British South African Police), and published several novels about
bohemian life in Paris. When Beadle came to America, from Paris, in November 1916, he listed Hastings as his nearest friend in Paris. Towards the end of her life Hastings felt excluded from the literary recognition she felt her due, and blamed Orage, whom she accused of conspiring to keep her out of literary circles in Britain. She published a pamphlet,
The Old New Age (1936), in which she bitterly criticised Orage, calling him 'a rustic, a lout, a snob'. Hastings claimed that she 'offended Orage's masculine amour-propre, and for this, was made the victim of a social cabale [...] a literary boycott that does, or should, matter to every reading person'. While many of the contents of this pamphlet are thought to be exaggerated, it nevertheless shines a light on Orage's already well-documented misogyny, and the experience of being a female author in the 1910s. In 1943, probably suffering from cancer, she killed herself with gas from a domestic cooker. == Posthumous recognition ==