Ruan

Bryher (2 September 1894 - 28 January 1983) was the pen name of the English novelist, poet, memoirist, and magazine editor Annie Winifred Ellerman, of the Ellerman ship-owning family.
She was a major figure of the international set in Paris in the 1920s, using her fortune to help many struggling writers. With her lesbian lover Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Scottish writer Kenneth Macpherson, she launched the film magazine Close Up. From her home in Switzerland, she helped to evacuate Jews from Hitler's Germany, and then became a popular historical novelist.
Born in Margate, England, the daughter of shipowner and financier John Ellerman, who at the time of his death in 1933 was the richest Englishman who had ever lived, she was enrolled in a traditional English boarding school at 14. On her European travels, she 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, she was an unconventional figure in Paris. Among her circle of friends were Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Her wealth enabled her to lend financial support to struggling writers, including Joyce and Edith Sitwell. She also helped finance Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company and started a film company Pool Group. She also helped the destitute Dada artist and writer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to purchase a Paris flat.
In 1933, through her magazine Close up, she urged readers to help the Jews in Germany, and her home in Switzerland became a "receiving station" for refugees, helping more than 100 people escape Nazi persecution.
From 1940-1946 she lived in London with H.D. and supervised the literary magazine Life and Letters To-day.
Starting in 1952, she wrote a series of historical novels, including Roman Wall (1954), The Coin of Carthage (1963) and Ruan (1960).
She died in Vevey, Switzerland in 1983, aged 88.