The Heart to Artemis
A Writer’s Memoirs
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Bryher (1894-1985)—adventurer, novelist, publisher—flees Victorian Britain for the raucous streets of Cairo and sultry Parisian cafes. Amidst the intellectual circles of the twenties and thirties, she develops relationships with Marianne Moore, Freud, Paul Robeson, her longtime partner H.D., Stein, and others.
This compelling memoir, first published in 1962, reveals Bryher’s exotic childhood, her impact on modernism, and her sense of social justice by helping over 100 people escape from the Nazis.
“A work so rich in interest, so direct, revealing, and, above all, thought-provoking that this reader found it the most consistently exciting book of its kind to appear in many years.”—The New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Annie Winifred Ellerman, aka Bryher (1894-1983) was a modernist maverick: novelist, philathropist, publisher (along with "husband of convenience" Robert McAlmon), proponent of psychoanalysis, and longtime partner of the poet H.D. Published in the U.S. in 1962, this beautiful, exacting memoir looks back on her English childhood ("I knew it mattered more if I were naughty on the Continent than at home because I discredited not only myself but every other English child"); her intellectual and political development; her and her family's penurious existence during WWI; her friendships and encounters with the likes of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Freud, Yeats, and many others; and her work smuggling Jews out of Germany and Austria during the Nazi reign. Bryher takes great pains to make clear how chance and the social mores of the time shaped her voice and creative drive, spending ample time on psychoanalysis, Elizabethan literature, and proto-Modernists like Mallarme. Eloquently and engagingly written, Bryher's memoir will be attractive to anyone with an interest in modernism's development and personalities.
