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(3.83) | 2 | This autobiographical novel by the Imagist poet H. D. (1886-1961) is a rare and hallucinatory treasure. In writing HERmione, H. D. returned to a year in her life that was "peculiarly blighted." She was in her early twenties--"a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place." She had failed at Bryn Mawr, she felt hemmed in by her family, and she did not yet know what she was going to do with her life. The return from Europe of the wild-haired George Lowndes (Ezra Pound) expanded her horizons but threatened her sense of self. An intense new friendship with Fayne Rabb (Frances Josepha Gregg), an odd girl, brought an atmosphere that made our heroine's hold on everyday reality more tenuous. As Francesca Wade writes in her new introduction, "HERmione is H. D.'s rejoinder to mythic authority: her portrait of an artist groping her way slowly towards self-expression ends with her sexuality and artistic powers awoken, ready to name herself so all the world might know who she is."… (more) |
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Written in 1927 but not published until 1981.  | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (2)
▾Book descriptions This autobiographical novel by the Imagist poet H. D. (1886-1961) is a rare and hallucinatory treasure. In writing HERmione, H. D. returned to a year in her life that was "peculiarly blighted." She was in her early twenties--"a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place." She had failed at Bryn Mawr, she felt hemmed in by her family, and she did not yet know what she was going to do with her life. The return from Europe of the wild-haired George Lowndes (Ezra Pound) expanded her horizons but threatened her sense of self. An intense new friendship with Fayne Rabb (Frances Josepha Gregg), an odd girl, brought an atmosphere that made our heroine's hold on everyday reality more tenuous. As Francesca Wade writes in her new introduction, "HERmione is H. D.'s rejoinder to mythic authority: her portrait of an artist groping her way slowly towards self-expression ends with her sexuality and artistic powers awoken, ready to name herself so all the world might know who she is." ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
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From the book cover:
"'I am Her,' she said to herself; she repeated, 'Her, Her, Her.' Her Gart tried to hold on to something; drowning she grasped, she caught at a smooth surface, her fingers slipped, she cried in her dementia, 'I am Her, Her, Her.'"
It is 1909 and Hermione Gart is in her early twenties--"a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place." Having just failed at her college, Bryn Mawr, she stays at home, stifled by her family, struggling for an identity, waiting for her life to begin. Then the wild poet George Lowndes returns from Europe, expanding her horizons, yet threatening her new, fragile sense of self. An intense and emotional friendship with another woman, Fayne Rabb, makes her hold on reality more tenuous. Inevitably Hermione is led to a mental breakdown that will become a turning point and a new beginning: as her own true self, as "Her"--the poet H.D.
The imagist poet H.D.--Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961)--wrote this personal autobiographical novel in 1927, but it has never been published until now. Recalling her brief, broken engagement to Ezra Pound (George Lowndes), and her relationship with Frances Josepha Gregg (Fayne Rabb), Her is both a fascinating record of a passage in H.D.'s life, and a novel written with the voice of one of America's greatest poets. | |
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The real treasure in reading HERmione is that those who try to nicely pigeonhole H. D. into the category of "Imagist poet" will find this overturned, not only because her prose is so beautiful and bewitching, but because she is one of the most overlooked writers in literary modernism when it comes to prose.
Sadly, her prose is often overlooked in favor of her fine poetry, but HERmione is one of the best modernist novels of the mid-1920s and rightfully deserves to be on lists of major novels from this period alongside other giants like Woolf and Joyce. (