Holy Skirts is a fabulously written biographical novel based on the eccentric Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. This is a vivid, rewarding re-imagining of the life of a true original. The story traces the vibrant Elsa from a stint in Berlin’s Wintergarten Cabaret through a series of lovers, through two marriages before she meets the charming, though impoverished, Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven in New York City. In addition to being an integral part of the revolutionary Dada art movement, the Baroness was a sexual libertine, fashion avatar, a poet, collagist, German émigré, and artist’s model who befriended artists and writers including Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. This engaging book is “about” one woman but it is also about so much more – art, artistic norms, perception, sex, convention of all kinds, eccentricity, fashion, and the avant-garde.

The Baroness is a feminist freethinker before there were labels for such ways of being. Rene Steinke re-imagines the life of this thoroughly modern character: "She could not remember when there had not been an alarming absence inside of her. . . She knew that it meant there was not enough of her somehow, that she could so easily be snuffed out. The sensation made her want to create evidence of herself.” Yet Steinke has managed to create not only a thoroughly riveting portrayal of one woman who pushes the limits of society, manners, poetry and art, but a complex and realistic portrait of an era as well, filled with insightful glimpses into an age where Victorian morals clashed with modern technological innovation.

Rene Steinke’s writing is vivid and compelling—a captivating portrait of a single, vibrant creative life filled with perversity and touches of insanity. Steinke’s exceptional book demonstrates the complicated inner-workings of an artist even as it explores them. In the Baroness’ description: "There had been no poem all day, just words, but she’d been finding solace in just typing them over and over, hoping one fragment might take interest in another like a man and a woman in a dance hall, but they were all wallflowers. . . She wanted her work to move between inside and outside, to obliterate those boundaries. Precisely because people protected them, they needed to be broke, to be permeable was human, thrilling."