cover image The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs

The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs

Bryher. Paris Press, $19.95 (374pp) ISBN 978-1-930464-08-7

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.