Bryher

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For the island of Bryher, one of the Isles of Scilly, see Bryher, Isles of Scilly.

Bryher (September 2, 1894– January 28, 1983) was the pen name of the novelist, poet, memoirist, magazine editor and woman of letters Annie Winnifred Ellerman. She was born in September 1894 in Margate, the illegitimate daughter of the shipowner and financier, John Ellerman, who by that time was well on his way to becoming the richest man in the United Kingdom.

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[edit] Early life

She travelled in Europe as a child, to France, Italy and Egypt. At the age of fourteen she was enrolled in a traditional English boarding school and at around this time her mother and father married. On one of her travels, Ellerman journeyed to the Isles of Scilly off the southwestern coast of Great Britain and acquired her future pseudonym from her favourite island, Bryher.

During the 1920s, Bryher was an unconventional figure in Paris. Among her circle of friends were Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach and Berenice Abbott.[citation needed] Her wealth enabled her to give financial support to struggling writers, including Joyce and Edith Sitwell. She also helped with finance for the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company (started by Sylvia Beach), and certain publishing ventures, and started a film company POOL Productions. She also helped provide funds to purchase a flat in Paris for struggling artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

[edit] Lifelong relationship and later life

Bryher knew from an early age that she was lesbian.[1] In 1918 she met and became involved in a lesbian relationship with poet Hilda Doolittle (better known by her initials, H.D.). The relationship was an open one, with both taking other partners. In 1921 she entered into a marriage of convenience with the American author Robert McAlmon, whom she divorced in 1927. [1]

That same year she married Kenneth Macpherson. Macpherson was H.D.'s lover, and the marriage served to hide their affair from H.D.'s husband, Richard Aldington.[1] In 1928, Doolittle became pregnant with Macpherson's child, but chose to abort the pregnancy.

Bryher divorced MacPherson in 1947. She and Doolittle no longer lived together after 1946, but continued their relationship until Doolittle's death in 1961.

[edit] Filmmaking and film criticism

Bryher, H.D., and Macpherson formed the film maagazine Close Up, and the POOL cinema group. Only one POOL film, Borderline (1930), starring H.D. and Paul Robeson, survives in its entirety. In common with the Borderline novellas, it explores extreme psychic states and their relationship to surface reality.[citation needed] Bryher herself plays an innkeeper.[2]

Bryher's most notable non-fiction work was Film Problems of Soviet Russia (1929). In Close up she compared Hollywood unfavorably with Soviet filmmaking, arguing that the studio system had "lowered the standards" of cinema.[3] Her writings also helped to bring Sergei Eisenstein to the attention of the British public.

[edit] World War II and after

In a 1933 article in Close up entitled "What Shall You Do in the War?", Bryher wrote about the situation of Jews in Germany, urging readers to take action. Starting that year, her home in Switzerland became a "receiving station" for refugees; she helped more than 100 people escape Nazi persecution before she was forced to flee herself in 1940. This experience influenced her 1965 "Science Fantasy" novel Visa for Avalon, about a group of people trying to escape an unnamed country for a place called Avalon on the eve of revolution.[4]

From 1940 to 1946 she lived in London with H.D. and supervised the literary magazine Life and Letters To-day. She later wrote a memoir of these years entitled The Days of Mars, as well as a novel, Beowulf (1948), set during the Blitz.

Starting in 1952, she wrote a series of historical novels. Most are set in Britain during various eras; The Roman Wall (1954) and The Coin of Carthage (1963) are set in the Roman Empire. They are well researched and vivid, typically set in times of turmoil and often seen from the perspective of a young man.

Acclaimed in her own time, her historical novels have now fallen out of print. Since 2000, Visa for Avalon, her early semi-autobiographical novels Development and Two Selves, and her memoir The Heart to Artemis have all been republished.

[edit] Selected works

[edit] Poetry

  • Region of Lutany (1914)

[edit] Novels

  • Development (1920)
  • Two Selves (1923)
  • West (1925)
  • Beowulf (1948)
  • The Fourteenth of October (1952)
  • The Player's Boy (1953)
  • Roman Wall (1954)
  • The Player's Boy (1957)
  • Gate to the Sea (1958)
  • Ruan (1960)
  • The Coin of Carthage (1963)
  • Visa for Avalon (1965)
  • This January Tale (1966)
  • The Colors of Vaud (1969)

[edit] Nonfiction

  • Film Problems of Soviet Russia (1929)
  • The Heart to Artemis: a Writer's Memoirs (1963)
  • The Days of Mars: a Memoir, 1940–1946 (1972)

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Benstock, Shari (1986). Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Texas: University of Texas Press, 312. ISBN 0-292-79040-6.
  2. ^ Latimer, Tirza True (2005). Women Together / Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 36. ISBN 0-8135-3595-6.
  3. ^ Williams, Deane (December 8, 1997). "Screening Coldicutt: Introduction". Screening the Past (2). Retrieved on 2006-11-01.
  4. ^ McCabe, Susan. "Introduction," xiii-xviii. Bryher (2004). Visa for Avalon. Ashfield, Mass.: Paris Press. ISBN 1-930464-07-X.
  • Analyzing Freud: The Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle by Bryher, H.D., Susan Stanford Friedman (Editor) ISBN 0-8112-1499-0
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