HERmioneHERmione

"This autobiographical novel by the Imagist poet H. D. is a rare and hallucinatory treasure. In writing HERmione, H. D. returned to a year in her life that was "peculiarly blighted." Her alter ego, 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." She had dropped out of Bryn Mawr and doesn't know what she is 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, bring an atmosphere that make our heroine's hold on everyday reality more tenuous. As Francesca Wade writes in her new afterword, "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."--