Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
H. D.
-
Standard Name: H. D.
Used Form: Hilda Doolittle
Birth Name: Hilda Doolittle
Married Name: Hilda Aldington
Self-constructed Name: H. D.
Pseudonym: John Helforth
Pseudonym: Edith Gray
Pseudonym: Helga Dorn
Pseudonym: J. Beran
Pseudonym: Rhoda Peter
Pseudonym: Helga Dart
Pseudonym: Delia Alton
Nickname: Dryad
Nickname: Dooley
Nickname: Astraea
HD, born American, who took British nationality after a marriage which lasted longer on paper than in practice, was a key figure in the international Imagist movement of the early twentieth century and in modernism more broadly: both through her own poetry and through her editing and dissemination of the work of others. As well as her imagistic pieces, she wrote complex longer poems (most published during her lifetime), translation, essays, reviews, outlines for films, and autobiographical novels which are, like most of her work, explorations of the self. Here she writes à clef of her own past, but also builds a web of mythical and psycho-analytical reference which makes her texts dense as well as rewarding. She is an explorer of the female psyche, and of the relation of gender to creativity and of myth to psychoanalysis.
The women critiqued and promoted each other's work, and in 1918 Lowell introduced Bryher to H. D.
's poetry.
Hanscombe, Gillian, and Virginia L. Smyers. Writing for Their Lives: The Modernist Women, 1910-1940. Women’s Press.
35-6, 219
Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History. University Press of Kentucky.
116
Intertextuality and Influence
Bryher
This collection marked Bryher's entry into modernism. Charting the constantly recurring, specifically Greek images, colours, and other motifs in Bryher's poems, Diana Collecott
links them to H. D.
's poetry, especially The Contest and Hipparchia...
Friends, Associates
Bryher
Bryher read and was highly enthusiastic about Marianne Moore
's poetry, which H. D.
had recommended to her. In 1921, following their meeting in the United States, Bryher arranged and paid for the publication...
Intertextuality and Influence
Bryher
Bryher's Poetry pieces appear again, along with others, in this volume. Focusing especially on the poems Amazon and Eos, Susan Stanford Friedman
observes Bryher's development of an Artemisian discourse
Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction. Cambridge University Press, http://Rutherford HSS.
193
shared with H. D.
Occupation
Bryher
With funds and additional production assistance, Bryher contributed to Weaver
's Egoist Press
's Poets' Translation Series. She also subsidized the publication of Hymen by H. D.
, which, like Moore's collection, was released...
Intertextuality and Influence
Bryher
Through meeting and observing these women and through her reading (including the Elizabethans, a Futurist manifesto, and H. D.
's poetry), Nancy works to stretch her ideas beyond the often limited, conventional possibilities for women...
Wealth and Poverty
Bryher
Bryher soon provided Richardson (as she did H. D.
) with a trust fund that yielded £250 a year.
Quartermain, Peter, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 45. Gale Research.
132
Intertextuality and Influence
Bryher
This text was inspired by the author's continued attachment to H. D.
, as well as her long-wished-for trip to the United States, which she took with H. D. and the latter's daughter, Perdita
Family and Intimate relationships
Bryher
In her first memoir, Bryher includes an evocative account of the meeting: [t]he door opened and I started in surprise. I had seen the face before, on a Greek statue or in some indefinable territory...
Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History. University Press of Kentucky.
118-20
Family and Intimate relationships
Bryher
During most of the intervening years, they worked, travelled, and lived together, sharing such intimate tasks as the raising of H. D.
's daughter Perdita
, who referred to them as my two mothers...
Performance of text
Bryher
The POOL
collective produced four silent films, the best-known and most ambitious of which is Borderline (1930). Presenting a seemingly disjointed, obscure mix of racial and sexual conflicts, Borderline shows the influences of Pabst
,...
Travel
Bryher
In the spring of 1920, Bryher and H. D.
began an extended holiday in Greece and Crete. They were accompanied by sexologist Havelock Ellis
, with whom they had first associated in 1918.
Collecott, Diana. H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910-1950. Cambridge University Press, http://Rutherford HSS.
67, 186, 283
Textual Production
Bryher
Desmond MacCarthy
had launched Life and Letters in June 1928; it issued its last number this month, and Bryher's new publication first appeared in September. It merged it with the London Mercury after May 1939...
Travel
Bryher
In September 1920, Bryher's desire to meet American poets and see the liberating New World took her, H. D.
, and H. D.'s daughter
to the United States. Bryher met H. D.'s associate Marianne Moore
