Also, now I think about it, Bryher is linked in my mind with Hope Mirrlees and Alice B. Toklas, all being in some sense the talented but junior partners in their respective relationships with other women, at a time when it was largely necessary to design and build that ship as you were sailing it.
Bryher in her lifetime with H.D. seems to have been well-known and well-regarded, but she's definitely the shadowy secondary by now. I don't think any of her novels are currently in print—I only read Visa for Avalon because I found a ten-year-old reprint in a used book store—and her poetry is sufficiently out of copyright to appear on the internet, which on the one hand makes it very easy to point people toward and on the other makes me worry I'll never find a hard copy of Arrow Music unless I print it out myself or have a lot of cash to spare. And her poetry is amazing. Visa for Avalon is like the secret source text of a certain strain of fantasy. Her two early semi-autobiographies Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923) are beautifully written, simultaneously evocative and analytical (selecting at random—that's exactly how reading works as a child). I realize I'm evangelizing where you don't need it, so I think I will just agree that Bryher should not be as obscure as she is—as a novelist, as a poet, as a filmmaker and critic, as a woman with a complex gender identity that she wrote about—and I'd love to see a serious effort made to bring her work back into view; it deserves it.
I have a very difficult time seeing Hope Mirrlees as junior to anyone, but I read Lud-in-the-Mist before Prolegomena.
Anyway, this entry is mostly to recommend people who share my liking for accounts of low-tide walks and of drowned lands to listen to today's Open Country, which documents a walk across the once-inhabited landscape between Tresco and Bryher, now usually hidden by the estranging sea but revealed at spring low tide.
If it stays streamable until I get home tonight, I will!
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Date: 2014-04-24 05:23 pm (UTC)Bryher in her lifetime with H.D. seems to have been well-known and well-regarded, but she's definitely the shadowy secondary by now. I don't think any of her novels are currently in print—I only read Visa for Avalon because I found a ten-year-old reprint in a used book store—and her poetry is sufficiently out of copyright to appear on the internet, which on the one hand makes it very easy to point people toward and on the other makes me worry I'll never find a hard copy of Arrow Music unless I print it out myself or have a lot of cash to spare. And her poetry is amazing. Visa for Avalon is like the secret source text of a certain strain of fantasy. Her two early semi-autobiographies Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923) are beautifully written, simultaneously evocative and analytical (selecting at random—that's exactly how reading works as a child). I realize I'm evangelizing where you don't need it, so I think I will just agree that Bryher should not be as obscure as she is—as a novelist, as a poet, as a filmmaker and critic, as a woman with a complex gender identity that she wrote about—and I'd love to see a serious effort made to bring her work back into view; it deserves it.
I have a very difficult time seeing Hope Mirrlees as junior to anyone, but I read Lud-in-the-Mist before Prolegomena.
Anyway, this entry is mostly to recommend people who share my liking for accounts of low-tide walks and of drowned lands to listen to today's Open Country, which documents a walk across the once-inhabited landscape between Tresco and Bryher, now usually hidden by the estranging sea but revealed at spring low tide.
If it stays streamable until I get home tonight, I will!