Bryher

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.

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, being acquainted or indeed intimate with Ernest Hemingway. Bisexual, she has been linked romantically with many men and women of the day, including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach and Berenice Abbott. 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.

Lifelong relationship and later life

In 1918 Bryher 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, Bryher and Doolittle lived together and were all sexually involved with one another. In 1928, Doolittle became pregnant with Macpherson's child, but chose to abort the pregnancy. The three of them set up the magazine Close Up, and formed the POOL cinema group to write about and make films. Only one POOL film survives in its entirety, titled Borderline (1930), starring H.D. and Paul Robeson. In common with the Borderline novellas, the film explores extreme psychic states and their relationship to surface reality.

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

World War II and after

Prior to and during World War II, Bryher and Alice B. Toklas were instrumental in helping hundreds of mainly Jewish refugees escape from the Nazis. During the war she supervised the literary magazine Life and Letters Today.

Bryher's most notable non-fiction work was Film Problems of Soviet Russia (1929). She was co-founder and co-editor of film journal Close-Up and helped to bring Sergei Eisenstein to the attention of the British public.

Bryher received most acclaim for the historical novels which she wrote after the Second World War, most of which are set in Britain during various eras, including Beowulf (1948) in which she examined her feelings about England in the aftermath of the war. The Roman Wall (1954) and The Coin of Carthage (1963), which are set in the Roman Empire. Her novels were well researched and vivid, typically set in a time of turmoil and often seen from the perspective of a young man.

She published two volumes of memoirs, The Heart to Artemis: a Writer's Memoirs (1963) and The Days of Mars: a Memoir, 1940â€"1946 (1972).

Selected works

Region of Lutany, (1914) - poems
Development (1920) - novel
Two Selves (1923) - novel
West (1925) - novel
Film Problems of Soviet Russia (1929) - non-fiction
Beowulf (1948) - novel
The Fourteenth of October (1954) - novel
Roman Wall (1955) - novel
The Player's Boy (1957) - novel
Gate to the Sea (1959) - novel
The Heart to Artemis: a Writer's Memoirs (1963) - memoirs
The Coin of Carthage (1964) - novel
Visa for Avalon (1965) - novel
The Days of Mars: a Memoir, 1940â€"1946 (1972) - memoirs

External links

*The article Superior Guinea Pig: Bryher and Psychoanalysis by Maggie Magee, M.S.W. and Diana C. Miller, M.D. at http://laisps.org/GuineaP.html

References

Analyzing Freud: The Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle by Bryher, H.D., Susan Stanford Friedman (Editor) ISBN 0811214990