The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs

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 1920's, 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, which introduced Sergei Eisenstein's work to British viewers. From her home in Switzerland, she helped to evacuate Jews from Hitler's Germany, and then became a popular historical novelist.
Born in Margate, Kent, her father was the shipowner and financier John Ellerman, who at the time of his death in 1933, was the richest Englishman who had ever lived. She traveled throughout Europe as a child and was enrolled in a traditional English boarding school at the age of fourteen. On one of her travels, Ellerman 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, Bryher was an unconventional figure in Paris. Among her circle of friends were Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach and Berenice Abbott. Her wealth enabled her to give financial support to struggling writers. She also helped with finance for Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company and certain publishing ventures, and started a film company Pool Group. She helped provide funds to purchase a flat in Paris for the destitute Dada artist and writer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
From 1940 to 1946 she lived in London and supervised the literary magazine Life and Letters To-day. She later wrote a memoir of these years entitled The Days of Mars, as well as a novel, Beowulf (1948), set during the Blitz. She also began writing a series of historical novels in the 1950s.
Bryher died in 1983 aged 88.