English professor charts out the hidden love story between two iconic, early 20th-century women

The love story between the American writer Hilda Doolittle (also known as H.D.) and the English novelist Annie Winifred Ellerman (who went by the pen name Bryher) spans 30 years, two world wars and several continents. And while the women’s lives contain plenty of theatrical elements — children born outside of marriage, broken engagements and shared lovers, to name just a few — their tale is not especially well-known.

This obscurity partly stems from the women’s relative lack of fame compared with other modernist authors and partly from the societal restrictions placed on homosexuality at the beginning of the 20th century, says Susan McCabe, professor of English at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

To bring the complicated relationship between the two women to light, McCabe analyzed letters H.D. and Bryher wrote to each other, as well as other friends and family members, and the semi-autobiographical poems and novels they authored. She recounts her findings in H.D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2021).

“H.D. and Bryher first met July 17, 1918, and then they either met again every July 17 until H.D.’s death in 1961, or they wrote to each other on that date if they were apart,” McCabe says. “They are speaking to one another across these letters and in their autobiographical novels, but you can see they want to be anonymous — they were sort of fearful of being found out, they felt a bit criminal in a sense and there was also some guilt.”

Wild oats

The two women are fascinating because they alternately flew in the face of convention and adhered rather strictly to it, McCabe explains.

H.D. was perhaps the more tumultuous of the two, McCabe says. She was born in 1886 to a middle-class family in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and attended Bryn Mawr College for a few semesters before dropping out. She was briefly engaged to the American poet Ezra Pound, who urged her to move to Europe to immerse herself, as an aspiring poet and author, in modernist literature.

After her engagement with Pound ended, H.D. moved to England, where she had a couple of relationships with women before marrying English writer Richard Aldington. The couple grew estranged, however, and while they were living apart, H.D. became pregnant with a child fathered by Scottish composer Cecil Gray.

While pregnant, and having parted from Gray, H.D. met Bryher.

Bryher herself had led an unconventional life. Born out of wedlock in 1894, her father was a shipping magnate who became one of the richest men in Europe. But even at an early age, Bryher seemed uncomfortable with conventional femininity of the time. She disliked her mother’s preference for frilly clothing and wanted to become a cabin boy as a child, McCabe says.

“She was a gender rebel way before her time in terms of being a proto-transgender type, and H.D. helped her because H.D., too, had a sense of herself as a ‘her’ and ‘him’ together. So, boy-girls, they were,” McCabe explains.

Sexually, Bryher was more interested in women than men. When Bryher met H.D., the latter’s life was “falling apart,” McCabe says. Bryher helped H.D. through the birth of her daughter in 1918 and set up a network to provide support for her, in a time when raising a child born out of wedlock was very difficult, McCabe notes.

Tangled lovers’ web

After the birth of H.D.’s daughter, the two women traveled together to Italy and Greece before returning to London, where they shared an apartment. Ultimately, the two lived together for nearly three decades in England and Switzerland, and journeyed around Europe and the United States.

“Although Bryher tries to distance herself from her parents, they really want her to marry a man. And so H.D. and Bryher find themselves in this state of forced Victorianism — anonymity, no scandal, no photographs,” McCabe says. Their main form of public expression during this time is their writing, which explores homosexuality and gender as well as other avant-garde or taboo topics, such as interracial relationships and psychoanalysis.

Bryher was highly supportive of not only H.D.’s work but that of other modernists during this period as well, McCabe adds.

In the end, Bryher did get married — twice. Her first husband was American novelist Robert McAlmon, and her second was Scottish novelist Kenneth Macpherson, a bisexual man who was also H.D.’s lover.

“Bryher and H.D. had sort of a three-way triangle with Macpherson, who is ultimately queer and has many boyfriends during this period,” McCabe says. The three, along with H.D.’s daughter, all lived together in Switzerland for a time. H.D. became pregnant with Macpherson’s baby but had an abortion due to her health and her advanced age at pregnancy.

During the second World War, Bryher aided more than 100 Jews, psychoanalysts and other dissidents in escaping from Nazi Germany from her Bauhaus in Switzerland, and she traveled to New York to make connections for arriving exiles, as well.

After World War II, H.D. and Bryher separated, living apart until H.D.’s death in 1961. (Bryher died in 1983). Although they no longer lived together, they wrote to each other often and maintained a strong emotional connection, McCabe says. H.D. felt Bryher was her lifelong complement.

“She felt Bryher was what she called ‘the whole machine.’ Bryher was the wrapping around the live wire that was H.D.,” she says.

The story of H.D. and Bryher is not simply one of the tumultuous lives of two women, but an illustration of how ideas of transgenderism, homosexuality and other unconventional concepts were present well before the late 20th century.

“I was surprised myself in writing the book to see how really deeply messy and difficult, but exciting and thrilling, their lives were. And how they were on the edge of this tumultuous time in history and art, with the avant-garde and spirituality and psychoanalysis — it was truly exceptional,” McCabe says.