Bryher
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- 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. 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. James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach and Berenice Abbott. Her wealth enabled her to give financial support to writers, including Joyce and Edith Sitwell. She also helped with finance for the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Co and certain publishing ventures and started a film company POOL Productions.
Bryher entered into a marriage of convenience with the American author Robert McAlmon in 1921, whom she divorced in 1927. That same year she married Kenneth Macpherson, and in turn she divorced him in 1947. Her real partner was the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.).
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 0811214990de:Bryher