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.
MS
published a highly laudatory review, Two Notes, of H. D.
's poetry in The Egoist.
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
265
Publishing
May Sinclair
MS
's long article on H. D.
's development as a poet was printed in almost complete form in The Fortnightly Review; it had appeared five years earlier, much abridged, in the Dial.
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
ES
praises Marianne Moore
as one of the very few women who have written poetry of worth.
British Book News. British Council.
(1951): 446
(She also, however, accords H. D.
the highest praise.)
Textual Features
Edith Sitwell
The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer
, with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...
Textual Production
Edith Sitwell
John Lehmann
and Derek Parker
had published an earlier collection with the same title in 1970, but it was less valuable than it could have been because Edith's surviving brother, Sacheverell, decreed that all family...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
The book's narrator is an unnamed, ungendered arborist in mourning for his or her unnamed, ungendered partner, a literary academic whose spectre lingers about the book both figuratively, in the form of unfinished lectures, and...
Friends, Associates
Gertrude Stein
Over the years, the old crowd had begun to disperse and the Saturday evening salons were frequented more by writers and less by artists. Although GS
had published only a few volumes and had often...
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking.
244
Friends, Associates
Harriet Shaw Weaver
As editor, HSW
attempted to recruit Storm Jameson
for the paper, but Jameson unhappily could not accept a full-time position. She also began to acquaint herself with contributors, such as H. D.
, whom she...
Occupation
Harriet Shaw Weaver
Priced at less than sixpence, the pamphlets were reprints from The Egoist. Titles include H. D.
's Choruses from Iphigenia in Aulis, Aldington
's Latin Poems of the Renaissance, F. S. Flint
Occupation
Harriet Shaw Weaver
The Egoist Press
went on to publish Dora Marsden's The Definition of the Godhead, Eliot
's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Pound
's Dialogues of Fontenelle, Lewis
's Tarr,...
Friends, Associates
Harriet Shaw Weaver
HSW
and Bryher
were good friends who collaborated on publication projects (Marianne Moore
's Poems, H. D.
's Hymen, and others) and travelled together.
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking.
