Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Bryher
-
Standard Name: Bryher
Birth Name: Annie Winifred Ellerman
Self-constructed Name: Bryher
Indexed Name: A. W. Ellerman
Indexed Name: Winifred Bryher
Indexed Name: W. Bryher
Nickname: Dolly
Nickname: Boy
In considering the paucity of credit given to Bryher for her patronage of the influential Contact Press
, critic Jayne Marek
describes her as an invisible woman.
Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History. University Press of Kentucky.
116
Bryher is even less recognized as a writer than a patron: most of her texts are now out of print and have received little critical attention. Her novels, poems, memoirs, and criticism, together spanning much of the twentieth century, form a significant contribution to the development of Anglo-American modernism, particularly through their French and Imagist influences, and their explorations of topics including women's education, gender mutability, psychoanalysis, and film technology.
HD's work also featured in the pages of Margaret Anderson
's and Jane Heap
's The Little Review and in the Dial, whose editor, Marianne Moore
, gave specific attention to establishing her reputation...
Publishing
H. D.
During 1927-33 HD contributed to the avant-garde, influential film magazine Close Up: Devoted to the Art of Films, which Bryher
funded and of which Kenneth Macpherson
was the official editor. It had a temperate...
Publishing
Sylvia Beach
Paul Valéry
asked SB
to translate his essay Littérature; it was later published in Bryher
's Life and Letters Today, under the signature of Sylvia Beach
and the Author.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
333
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace.
HD's film writing of the 1930s went along with the actual making of films. Together with Bryher
, she helped to set up Pool Films or POOL
, whose productions included Wingbeat, Foothills...
Material Conditions of Writing
H. D.
H. D.
's aesthetic manifesto, Notes on Thought and Vision, written in July 1919 when she and Bryher
visited the Isles of Scilly, was posthumously published with the date of 1982.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Boughn, Michael. H.D.: A Bibliography 1905-1990. University Press of Virginia.
75
Literary responses
Violet Hunt
VH
's biography was warmly received both formally and informally. H. D.
(Hilda Doolittle
) wrote to Hunt from Switzerland on 30 September 1932, imagining [h]ow happy the book must make you! The style...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dorothy Richardson
Though DR
did not meet her future friend and supporter Bryher
until several months after the publication of Revolving Lights in early 1923, critics have noted many points of thematic and structural similarity between Richardson's...
Health
H. D.
The father this time was Bryher
's second husband, Kenneth Macpherson
, with whom HD had been having an affair since 1926, and whom, some months before this event, she had allowed to adopt her...
Health
H. D.
Not long after this, at the urging of Bryher
, she met with therapist Hanns Sachs
for psychoanalysis in Berlin. Bryher had also undergone psychoanalysis with Sachs. He diagnosed HD as having a mother...
Health
Dorothy Richardson
Macmillan was an American who had intended to go into the priesthood, but left an Episcopal seminary to come to England when he found himself unable to continue his vocation. By the time DR
went...
Health
H. D.
Already suffering from anaemia and meningitis, H. D.
began to be convinced that World War Three had actually begun. Bryher
moved her to the Klinik Kusnacht
in Zurich, Switzerland.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “’Remembering Shakespeare Always, But Remembering Him Differently’: H.D.’s By Avon River”. Sagetrieb, Vol.
2
, No. 2, pp. 45-70.
53
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
The shifting, erratic, oddly mixed wartime social scene
Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton.
166
enabled ICB
to become more outgoing, and she established friendships with H. D.
, Bryher
, and Una Pope-Hennessy
. She called HD Mrs Aldington...
Friends, Associates
Edith Sitwell
In Paris ES
frequented Sylvia Beach
's bookshop. She saw more than before of Gertrude Stein
, whom she liked for her personal qualities but called the last writer whom any other writer in the...
