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.
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
Dedications
H. D.
She dedicated this section to Bryher
and Robert Herring
, but the second part, written about eighteen months later (following her postwar nervous breakdown) and titled The Guest, to Bryher alone.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. “’Remembering Shakespeare Always, But Remembering Him Differently’: H.D.’s By Avon River”. Sagetrieb, Vol.
2
, No. 2, pp. 45-70.
46-7, 53
Residence
H. D.
The three women travelled through England and France, meeting musician Walter Rummel
in Paris and Ezra Pound's literary circle in London. HD was persuaded to stay there by her old friend Pound, who had...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
H. D.
Like the later End to Torment, this relates its author's attachments to and disaffection from Lawrence
and Pound
, her (tor)mentors.
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.
Its material includes the end of HD's marriage and the beginning of her...
Cultural formation
H. D.
Of these two companions, Bryher
identified herself as lesbian while HD did not. Some commentators, such as Janice Robinson
, have described the relationship between them as a lesbian marriage, although both took measures to...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
H. D.
These date from 1921-2 and (like their successor, HERmione, written in 1927 and published as Her in 1981), are romans à clef. They trace the events of HD's emotional life (she appears as Hermione...
Family and Intimate relationships
H. D.
It is now generally accepted among HD's biographers and critics that Cecil Gray
had fathered the child. HD informed her Richard Aldington
, her husband, of her pregnancy while he was still on active duty...
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...
Occupation
H. D.
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...
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...
Friends, Associates
Marianne Moore
MM
corresponded with T. S. Eliot
from 1921 until the year before his death. She was a friend of H. D.
and of Bryher
, and her editors believe that every one of her five...
Textual Production
Marianne Moore
In the early 1920s MM
was already an influential New York reviewer, who covered such landmark texts as T. S. Eliot
's The Sacred Wood, 1921, Bryher
's first novel, Development, also in...
Textual Production
Marianne Moore
Twenty-four of MM
's Poems were selected, ostensibly without her knowledge, by H. D.
and Mr. and Mrs. Robert McAlmon (the latter being her friend Bryher
)
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.
