H. D. & Bryher - by Susan McCabe (Hardcover)

About the Book

H.D & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism explores the lives of two queer women, one a poet and the other a historical novelist, living from the late 19th century through the 20th century. Seeking invisibility to shield their deviance, they quested ancient cultures and gnostic wisdom to find a more egalitarian creative process like electricity to anchor their lives together. As innovators of the power of two, their writing knit their psyches together.

Book Synopsis

H.D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism takes on the daring task of examining the connection between two queer women, one a poet and the other a historical novelist, living from the late 19th century through the 20th century. When they met in 1918, H.D. was a modernist poet, married to a shell-shocked adulterous poet, and pregnant by another man. She fell in love with Bryher, who was entrapped by her wealthy secretive family. Their bond grew over Greek poetry, geography, ancient history and literature, the telegraph, and telepathy. They felt their love-and their true identities existed invisibly- a giddy, and disturbing element to their relationship; they lived off and on in distant geographies, though in near continual contact. This book exposes why literary history has occluded this love story of the world wars and poetic modernism.

Review Quotes

"McCabe is intimately alert to the ever-shifting world that H. D. and Bryher occupied. The biography is a helpful guide to the signs, symbols, nicknames and ménages à trois that helped the couple to understand and protect themselves as a family unit over four decades." -- Jade French, TLS

"This double biography is the untold story of two lifelong lovers who, together and apart, played a role in shaping Modernism and the sexual politics that lay ahead" -- Cassandra Langer, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide

"This rich and stunning biography tells the untold story of two women, Bryher and H.D., who radically shaped modernism. McCabe uncovers the emergence of their aesthetics, spirituality, sexuality, politics and more--together and apart--against the backdrop of the oppressive milieu, their international travel, and beyond" -- Cassandra Laity, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

"Susan McCabe reclaims the lifelong love affair of H.D. and Bryher for our time. The couple emerges not just as collaborators at the forefront of literary modernism but as champions of gender fluidity." -- Linda Leavell, author of Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore

About the Author

Susan McCabe is a professor of English and Creative Writing at USC, and has published Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (1994) and Cinematic Modernism (2005) and received as well the Agha Shahid Prize for a book of poems, Descartes' Nightmare (2008).