Books by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

A landmark book in the studies of Freud, H.D., modernism, gender, and sexuality. The poet H.D. (1886-1961) was in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna during the spring of 1933 and again in the fall of 1934. She visited him daily at his study at 19 Berggasse, while outside Nazi thugs and militia bullied their way through the streets. Freud was old, and fragile. H.D. was forty-six and despairing of her writing life, which seemed to have reached a dead end, for all her success. Her sessions with Freud proved to be the point of transition, the funnel into which were poured her memories of the past and associations in the present—and from which she emerged reborn. H.D. came to Freud at the urging of her companion, the novelist Bryher (1884-1983), the daughter of a wealthy British shipping magnate. Freud welcomed H.D. as a creative spirit whose work he respected, but he did ask her not to prepare for their sessions, write about them in her journal, or talk about them with her friends, especially Bryher, who remained home in England. H.D.'s letters from Vienna filled the gap. Breezy, informal, irreverent, vibrant with detail, they revolve around her hours with Freud, making her correspondence unique in the spectrum of reminiscences, journals, memoirs, and biographies swirling around the legacy of the "Professor" and the movement he founded. The volume includes H.D. and Bryher's letters, as well as letters by Freud to H.D. and Bryher, most of them published for the first time. In addition, the book includes H.D. and Bryher's letters to and from Havelock Ellis, Kenneth MacPherson, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, and Anna Freud, among others. Fully annotated with Index and Photographs

In this complete, unabridged edition of H.D.'s visionary memoir, The Gift, Jane Augustine makes available for the first time the text as H.D. wrote it and intended it to be read, including H.D.'s coda to the book, her "Notes", never before published in its entirety. Written in London during the blitz of World War II, The Gift re-creates the peaceful childhood of Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where she was born in 1886. As an antidote to war's destructiveness, H.D. invokes the mystical Moravian heritage of her mother's family to convey an ideal world peace and salvation that would come through the spiritual power of women -- a power that also endowed her with "the gift" of her own art. Although H.D.'s androgynous signature first associated her with early 20th-century Imagist poetics, The Gift exemplifies her continuing innovations in prose. She uses the child-voice, flashback, and stream-of-consciousness techniques reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Dorothy Richardson, but expands the genre of memoir through free-associative meditations on myth and her lengthy essayistic "Notes" on Moravian history. The Gift is key to intertextual studies of H.D.'s wartime oeuvre and to an understanding of the religious and gender concerns pervading her later work, especially the women-centered poems Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. Augustine's introduction and annotations, based on extensive research in Moravian archives, provide a biographical and historical context to make this the definitive edition of The Gift, essential to students and scholars of H.D., modernism, and feminist literature.

In May 1929 Richard Aldington wrote to his wife and life-long friend, Hilda Doolittle, known to the world as the poet H.D.: 'You've got a rare, wonderful genius, and you can impose it. It's the most marvellous help to me to feel that you're "with me". Whatever happens, don't let us get separated again.'. Ironically, over the next thirty-two years they were often separated - by divorce, by continents and oceans, and finally in 1961, by death itself. But throughout their lives they wrote to each other frequently about their work, their friends - Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence among them - their children, lovers and companions, and their tempestuous and complex love for each other. Both were pioneers in Modernist literature and participants in the Imagist movement of 1912. H.D.'s early verse established her reputation as a female writer at the forefront of experimental expression. Her work was revealing, often autobiographical and examined her artistic and sexual relationships with both men and women. Richard Aldington was a poet, novelist and translator as well as a biographer who alienated the British establishment with his acerbic Lawrence of Arabia. Drawing on Aldington's and H.D.'s intimate correspondence between 1929 and 1961, Zilboorg explores their personal and professional lives, their friendships, and topics which concerned them both: cultural identity, sexuality, and the role of literature in the modern world. The letters collected together reveal an intimate portrait of one of this century's most fascinating literary couples and it is impossible not to be caught up in the narrative of this complex and moving relationship.