The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven wore on occasion a canary in a bird cage for a hat, or two tomato cans on a string for a bra, or a skirt whose bustle contained a red tail light wired to flash.

She was a poet, a muse to others, an eccentric, an artist’s model, a work of art herself at a time when suffragists were jailed for right-to-vote demonstrations, a time when women without a husband or family income barely survived.

“Holy Skirts” is a fictional version of Baroness Elsa’s life through three short marriages, the evolution of her poetry, her adventures in Greenwich Village and death in Paris. The novel is a 2005 National Book Award finalist.

Novels based on actual people are confusing. You cannot resist wondering – with the introduction of each character, each event – about fact vs. fiction, truth vs. invention.

The only biography so far, “Baroness Elsa,” by Irene Gammel, was published in 2002. The baroness did leave behind an unfinished autobiography, and author Rene Steinke credits it as a major source.

Steinke also used in her research the papers of The Little Review, which published poems by the baroness. Alas, the author’s note disconcertingly tells us the poems or fragments offered “are either taken directly from her papers or modeled closely on the poems there,” meaning you can’t be sure of the art, either.

Steinke is editor-in-chief of The Literary Review; perhaps she felt sure she recognized and could replicate word patterns, but it’s unsettling if you wish to assess the poems of the baroness, not Steinke.

Even so, the baroness was a Dadaist; this might amuse her. The artists of the Dada movement – among the best known, and known by the baroness, were Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp – rejected conventional ideas of beauty and morality. Dadaism was a reaction to World War I and, within a few years, morphed into surrealism.

Steinke describes an irresistible woman who boldly escapes a life in the provinces to support herself in Berlin, who holds her own in an almost totally male art culture, who creates art that does not bow to the mainstream.

Steinke explains well the process of creating art. The baroness says, “Intelligence is only brilliant common sense, a notion of the material – business, archaeology. Intellect is more of a spiritual property, an instinct developed until it comes to one’s consciousness.”

Or, of a poem composed of advertising phrases: “She wanted to find melody in the jumble of them, the pattern in why she’d chosen one and not another, to know how this might reflect a certain state of mind.”

Or, of a poem using overheard phrases: “Sometimes while she was writing, a slip of one of these street conversations insinuated into a poem, and what had been feeling and anonymous was set down in print. So much of writing was about not saying this, not saying that, the obvious crossed out, whole pages of notes not used, and then, purely by chance, a stranger’s talk suddenly mattered. Unpredictably, a scrap of the world seized up and glowed.”

In the baroness you may find the first performance artist, the first absurdist fashion designer and a poet whose poems force us, as poems should, to see and hear differently.

You will not find in the baroness that Steinke has fashioned a woman who is wholly admirable. She steals; her sexual expression often puts her in danger; she clings to men cruel to her and disdainful of her work; she struggles with friendship; she may be mad as her life draws to a close.

The baroness is above all complicated and, in that, fascinating. Steinke has drawn a fully realized character whose Dadaist impulses, even through the filter of time and fiction, still startle.