Bryher

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

Contents

1 Early life
2 Lifelong relationship and later life
3 World War II and after
4 Selected works

4.1 External links
4.2 References

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. This would become a lifelong relationship, although throughout it neither was faithful and both were promiscuous. She entered into a marriage of convenience with the American author Robert McAlmon in 1921, whom she divorced in 1927. [link]

That same year she married Kenneth Macpherson, and in turn she divorced him in 1947. The relationship between Macpherson, Bryher and her lesbian lover H. D. (Doolittle) was a strange one. Doolittle became pregnant with Macpherson's child, but had an abortion. All three lived together for a lengthy time, with all three being involved sexually with one another. 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.

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, 1940–1946 (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, 1940–1946 (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

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.