The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs [Paperback]

Bryher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2006

Bryher — adventurer, novelist, publisher — flees Victorian Britain for the raucous streets of Cairo and the sultry Parisian cafes. Amidst the intellectual circles of the twenties and thirties, she develops relationships with her longtime partner H. D., and with Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, and others. This compelling memoir reveals Bryher's exotic childhood, her impact on modernism, and her sense of social justice-helping over 100 people escape from the Nazis while fleeing the war herself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Annie Winifred Ellerman, aka Bryher (1894-1983) was a modernist maverick: novelist, philathropist, publisher (along with "husband of convenience" Robert McAlmon), proponent of psychoanalysis, and longtime partner of the poet H.D. Published in the U.S. in 1962, this beautiful, exacting memoir looks back on her English childhood ("I knew it mattered more if I were naughty on the Continent than at home because I discredited not only myself but every other English child"); her intellectual and political development; her and her family's penurious existence during WWI; her friendships and encounters with the likes of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Freud, Yeats, and many others; and her work smuggling Jews out of Germany and Austria during the Nazi reign. Bryher takes great pains to make clear how chance and the social mores of the time shaped her voice and creative drive, spending ample time on psychoanalysis, Elizabethan literature, and proto-Modernists like Mallarmé. Eloquently and engagingly written, Bryher's memoir will be attractive to anyone with an interest in modernism's development and personalities.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker

Bryher was born Annie Winifred Ellerman in the repressive world of Victorian England, where, as she says in this wide-ranging memoir, "an invitation to tea was a sacred obligation." At an early age, she vowed to "break the unhealthy taboos of the nineteenth century," and, as the lover of the poet H.D., she became familiar with most of Parisian cafe society—she claims they thought her a "bore" because she didn't drink. Never afraid to get her hands dirty, she rode donkeys in Egypt, climbed mountains in a skirt, changed the hot and messy carbons in lights on early movie sets, flew airplanes, and helped people escape from Nazi Germany. Bryher's reputation as a writer rests on her postwar historical novels, but this portrait of a tumultuous era shows her passionate involvement in the present.
Copyright © 2006 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Paris Press (July 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1930464088
• ISBN-13: 978-1930464087
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #893,531 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating memoir!, September 21, 2006

By 

Lainey Harris (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs (Paperback)

I was interested in reading The Heart to Artemis because I heard that Bryher was interested in psychoanalysis, and that she knew Freud. What an amazing life she led! And what a great writer she is. This memoir is unlike any I have ever read. Bryher vividly writes about her experience with Freud (who only wanted to talk about Bryher's experience flying in an airplane). And she writes about her relationship with H.D. She describes her Victorian childhood - the severe restrictions and expectations imposed on her, as well as the extensive travels with her unmarried parents and her first camel ride. I was intrigued that Bryher knew personally so many of the writers I've long admired: Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore. With all this socializing - I identified with her quiet reserve. She also describes so graphically the impact of WWI on the young and old and she observed the events leading up to WWII. Her emphasis on social responsibility seems most important to me. This is an amazing book that is interesting on many levels. I highly recommend it!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It Ends at the Blitz, October 30, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs (Paperback)

Her family had heaps of money, and some said her father was the richest man in England, though this is not immediately apparent in Bryher's account of her midddle-class childhood and upbringing. Money couldn't save her from the old ennui, however, and she soon found, at age four, that the world seemed more real in books--books like her early favorite, Johann Wyss' SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON, with its Romantic reimagining of the nuclear family shipwrecked on a desert island yet still managing to maintain a happy structure. She was brought outside as a baby to watch the dark night sky light up for once during the diamond jubilee of Victoria. And yet she managed to throw herself into life and rubbing elbows with many of the modernist bigwigs, from Freud to Havelock Ellis. She married improvident men twice, and made her life with the poet H.D., who must have recently died when Bryher began her memoir, for much of the book's second half seems like an extended elegy to H.D.'s American elegance and sex appeal. For the times (first published in 1963) THE HEART TO ARTEMIS is surprisingly frank about the relationship between herself and H.D.

The only weakness I see in the book is perhaps a fault only to the bourgeois; she literally tells about and neglects to show us--to use workshop jargon that she bwould have abhorred--how stifling it was to be a young woman in the pre-war period. It's funny because she makes so many other things vivid and alive; the book is filled with specific smells, noises, colors and the feel of fabric. But the utter restraint she so often moans about, and probably to good reason, remains uninhabited. Perhaps that's tied up with what it was: an absence. She has one funny part where she describes how even landscape gardening had its strict codes, and one of them was the absolute insistence on decoration, what would strike us now as an absurd number of plantings. "Everything at that time had to curl," she writes. "There ought to be some special term to describe the horror a blank space evoked in 1900."

Those of you puzzled by the title will find an explanation on page 111 in which, at age nine, she gave her heart to Artemis, her body to exploration. Social restrictions irked her; she despaired of succeeding as a novelist, for example, because "social taboos have cut me off from much of the material that I should have liked to use." She cites the case of a lumberman whose earthy chitchat she will never be able to overhear unguarded. At the same time, she is almost mystic about the power of the artist. "I have a profound contempt for the writer who speaks of making his work intelligible to the masses," she says. "He is not serving them but betraying their trust. Our job is to feel the movement of time as its direction is about to change and there can be no reward but the vision itself. It is natural that we should be both disliked and ignored."

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A blatant editing error!, May 13, 2007

By 

bks4lyf - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs (Paperback)

I love reading this book, but reader beware - Bryher frequently talks about the influence of "Henry" on her reading life. Actually that would be "Henty", as in G. A. Henty. I can't believe the editing staff made such a huge error! Don't let this stop you from reading this fine memoir.