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.
In July 1927 Bryher and Macpherson
founded Close Up magazine, dedicated to avant-garde film theories and practices.
Hanscombe, Gillian, and Virginia L. Smyers. Writing for Their Lives: The Modernist Women, 1910-1940. Women’s Press.
276
Both as editor and contributor, Bryher used Close Up as a forum to develop and share her...
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,...
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...
Material Conditions of Writing
Bryher
When Bryher and her companion H. D.
travelled to Greece in the spring of 1920, the trip profoundly affected the personal and professional outlook of each; these poems were part of the result.
Bryher,. The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs. Collins.
191
Quartermain, Peter, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 45. Gale Research.
128
Literary responses
Bryher
After reading the highly enthusiastic pamphlet, Lowell sent an appreciative message to Bryher, but expressed some (ultimately unfounded) concern about it in another letter to H. D.
: the girl has insight and a good...
Literary responses
Bryher
In an Egoist review, Richard Aldington
praised Bryher for following the literary-literal principles recently established by the Poets' Translation Series, which he and H. D.
were running at the Egoist Press
, and which...
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...
Literary responses
Charlotte Mew
May Sinclair
thought Madeleine magnificent, having depths & depths of passion & of sheer beauty.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
191
She also enjoyed the high Victorian melodrama of Mew's reading aloud.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
192
Despite her efforts to bring The Farmer's...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Adrienne Rich
First published in 1971 (Rich's collections often include writings issued previously), the essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision is described in 1988 by Elizabeth Meese
as still inform[ing] much of the best work...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Ellen Harrison
JEH
's work exerted a palpable influence on the Modernist movement in literature, and both her persona and her life's work were represented, sometimes in much modified form, in many creative texts. Critic Julia Briggs
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...
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.
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Following Michael Field
, many twentieth-century, lesbian-identified writers treat Sappho
as a crucial precursor. She became a figure for modernism with the work of HD
and Virginia Woolf
. The Lavender Nation
was named from...
