The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs

by Bryher

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787204294
Publisher:	Valmy Publishing
Publication date:	04/07/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	878 KB

About the Author

Bryher (2 September 1894 - 28 January 1983) was the pen name of the English novelist, poet, memoirist, and magazine editor Annie Winifred Ellerman, of the Ellerman ship-owning family.

She was a major figure of the international set in Paris in the 1920’s, using her fortune to help many struggling writers. With her lesbian lover Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Scottish writer Kenneth Macpherson, she launched the film magazine Close Up, which introduced Sergei Eisenstein’s work to British viewers. From her home in Switzerland, she helped to evacuate Jews from Hitler’s Germany, and then became a popular historical novelist.

Born in Margate, Kent, her father was the shipowner and financier John Ellerman, who at the time of his death in 1933, was the richest Englishman who had ever lived. She traveled throughout Europe as a child and was enrolled in a traditional English boarding school at the age of fourteen. 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. Her wealth enabled her to give financial support to struggling writers. She also helped with finance for Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare and Company and certain publishing ventures, and started a film company Pool Group. She helped provide funds to purchase a flat in Paris for the destitute Dada artist and writer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

From 1940 to 1946 she lived in London 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. She also began writing a series of historical novels in the 1950s.

Bryher died in 1983 aged 88.

Editorial Reviews

"Bryher's reputation as a writer rests on her postwar historical novels, but this portrait of a tumultuous era shows her passionate involvement in the present."—The New Yorker

"Bryher's reputation as a writer rests on her postwar historical novels, but this portrait of a tumultuous era shows her passionate involvement in the present."—The New Yorker

"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

From the Publisher