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, 1995.
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
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, 1983.
333
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace, 1959.
160
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
H. D.
Between 1935 and 1950 HD had available as an outlet for her writing Life and Letters To-Day, the new magazine which Bryher
established through a merger of Life and Letters with The London Mercury...
Publishing
Dorothy Richardson
DR
contributed over twenty essays and reviews, including the regular column, Continuous Performance, to Bryher
's avant-garde film magazine Close Up.
Hanscombe, Gillian. The Art of Life: Dorothy Richardson and the Development of Feminist Consciousness. Peter Owen, 1982.
189-90
Staley, Thomas F., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 36. Gale Research, 1985.
217
Publishing
Dorothy Richardson
Having begun writing poetry in mid-1923, Richardson was initially reluctant to share her poems with even her intimates: for instance with Bryher, who was a close friend and sometimes a creative confidante to H. D.
Reception
H. D.
Before this book was published, Marianne Moore
expressed great eagerness to see it, and Bryher
's preface to it.
Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History. University Press of Kentucky, 1995.
163
Reception
Margiad Evans
ME
heard that she was to receive a sum of money which an anonymous benefactor (whom she obliquely identifies as Bryher
) awarded each year to a little-known writer to fund holiday travel.
Evans, Margiad. A Ray of Darkness. Arthur Barker, 1952.
43
Reception
Dorothy Richardson
DR
first read Proust
(Swann's Way) in December 1922. She devoted much time to her reading and thinking about Proust, and relished his writing for being a thousand things at once, with the...
Reception
Dorothy Richardson
DR
thought less of Woolf
's writing, and disliked juxtapositions of their work by critics. In 1937 she refused requests from Life and Letters Today and the London Mercury to review Woolf's The Years because...
Residence
H. D.
This therefore was when, after living in London throughout World War Two, HD and Bryher
took up their together-and-apart life in Switzerland.
Robinson, Janice S. H.D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet. Houghton Mifflin, 1982.
340
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. H.D.: The Career of That Struggle. Indiana University Press, 1986.
xx
Residence
Natalie Clifford Barney
While another of the Paris lesbian circle, Bryher
, devoted energy and resources to helping Jews and socialists escape from the countries under totalitarian rule, NCB
and Romaine Brooks
cared nothing for the fate of...
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...
Residence
Margiad Evans
ME
and her husband, Michael Williams
, travelled to Ireland on money anonymously supplied as a literary benefaction by Bryher
.
Evans, Margiad. A Ray of Darkness. Arthur Barker, 1952.
43
Textual Features
H. D.
HD's vers libre style here is much like that of her previous volume, but with this collection she embarked on giving a voice to mythical, mostly semi-divine and mostly female, personages from ancient Greece: not...
