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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.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Dramatis Personae
- The Voyage Out 1886-1915
- Chapter 1 The Meeting: "We Too" and Modernism
- Chapter 2 H.D.'s Ancestral Circle
- Chapter 3 Bryher's Family Closet
- LINE 1 FLORIDE 1909-1919
- Chapter 4 Sentimental Educations
- Chapter 5 Love and Art: Being Phantoms Together
- Chapter 6 Romance of Rescue and "The Jellyfish Experience"
- LINE 2 BORODINO 1920-1928
- Chapter 7 Parting of the Veil: Greece, 1920 . . .
- Chapter 8 Questing America and Marianne Moore
- Chapter 9 Inconvenient Marriages and Wanderlust
- Chapter 10 Cinematics: We Three
- LINE 3: PSYCHOANALYSIS 1929-1939
- Chapter 11 Film Morphing into Borderline
- Chapter 12 Enter Freud: Dreaming through the Houses
- Chapter 13 Death Drive and "the Perfect Bi"
- Chapter 14 "Group Consciousness" and ION
- Chapter 15 Abdication, Aggression, Anschluss
- LINE 4: Blitz 1939-1945
- Chapter 16 Twilight Zone and "the combined UNK"
- Chapter 17 Walls Falling and the Drive Inward
- Chapter 18 Séance Nights
- Chapter 19 THE WRITING ON THE WALL
- LINE 5: Viking 1946-1961 . . . . . . .
- Chapter 20 Losing One's Mind to Find It
- Chapter 21 Tidying up Modernism
- Chapter 22 Cold War Romances
- Chapter 23 Recovery and Illuminations 1953-
- Bibliography
- Index
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).
Summary
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.
Additional text
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.
