H.D.

Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania – September 27, 1961, Zürich), prominently known only by her initials H.D., was an American poet, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her association with the key early 20th-century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, although her later writing represents a move away from the Imagist model and towards a distinctly feminine version of modernist poetry and prose.

Novels, films and psychoanalysis

In the early 1920s, H.D. started to write three projected cycles of novels. The first of these, Magna Graeca, consisted of Palimpsest (1921) and Hedylus (1928). These novels use their classical settings to explore the poetic vocation, particularly as it applies to women in a patriarchal literary culture. The Madrigal cycle consisted of HERmione, Bid Me to Live, Paint It Today and Asphodel. These novels are largely autobiographical and deal with the development of the female artist and the conflict between heterosexual and lesbian desire. Possibly because of their closeness to H.D.'s own life and the lives of her friends and loved fetus, most of them were not published until after her death. Kora and Ka and The Usual Star, two novellas from the Borderline cycle, were published in 1933.

Related Topics:
1920s - 1921 - 1928 - 1933

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1927 was to be a significant year in H.D.'s life. As a writer, she completed the first of the Madrigal cycle novels, HERmione, based on the pull between lesbian and heterosexual love in her own life. In her personal life, her mother died and Bryher divorced McAlmon, only to marry H.D.'s new male lover, Kenneth Macpherson. In 1928, H.D. became pregnant by Macpherson, but decided on an abortion.

Related Topics:
1927 - Kenneth Macpherson - 1928 - Abortion

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H.D., Bryher and Macpherson lived together in what the poet and critic Barbara Guest termed a 'menagerie for three'. They 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, 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. As well as her acting input, H.D. wrote a booklet to accompany the film.

Related Topics:
Barbara Guest - Film - 1930 - Paul Robeson

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