Bryher

Bryher, nee Winifred Ellerman, was an author, philanthropist and activist who published several historical novels, of which Beowulf is the first, originally published in France in 1948 and subsequently in english in 1956 by Pantheon Books. In her early twenties, she adopted the name Bryher after an island in the Scilly Isles off the coast of England. Her other historical novels include The Roman Wall, Coin of Carthage, and The Player's Boy, a novel about Shakespearean England. This title as well as her speculative novel, A VISA TO AVALON, and her memoir A HEART TO ARTEMIS, were reprinted in the early 2000s by Paris Press and are now distributed by Wesleyan University Press. In addition to her own writing, Bryher was best known as the lifelong companion of the imagist poet H.D.. Lesser known is the fact that before and during World War II, Bryher assisted a great number of artists, writers and psychologists to escape from Nazi-held territories, among them were Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Max Ernst, and many others. She also wrote and co-directed with her husband Kenneth Macpherson the avant garde silent film Borderline, starring Paul Robeson. She lived in Vevey, Switzerland. Biographical Sketch Susan McCabe was born in 1960 on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and has taught in Oregon and Arizona, and received her PhD at UCLA. She also taught and conducted research in her mother's country of Sweden. She directed the PhD in Literature and Creative Writing Program (2006-2009), and has been President of the Modernist Studies Association. She is the author of four books, including two critical studies—Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (Penn State University Press, 1994) and Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2005)—and two poetry volumes, Swirl (Red Hen Press, 2003), and Descartes' Nightmare (winner of the Agha Shahid Ali prize and published by Utah University Press in 2008). She is author of the upcoming dual biography: H.D. and Bryher: A Modernist Love Story, to be published by Oxford University Press.