Bryher (writer)

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Bryher , actually Annie Winifred Ellerman (born September 2, 1894 in Margate , Kent , † January 28, 1983 in Vevey , Canton of Vaud ) was a British writer and publisher.

Life

Winifred Ellerman was the daughter and first child of the wealthy English shipping company Sir John Ellerman and his wife Hannah Glover Ellerman. In 1920 she rightfully adopted the class and gender-free name " Bryher " after her favorite island in the Scilly archipelago off the coast of Cornwall . As a child, she traveled almost constantly in Europe and the Middle East.

She met the American Hilda Doolittle in 1918 and began a love affair with the bisexual poet, who became known by her initials HD . When Doolittle had a child in 1919 and got into a serious crisis, Bryher took in mother and daughter Perdita. HD later referred to Bryher as her lifesaver. She and Bryher lived together until 1946 and remained friends until Doolitte's death in 1961. Perdita was homeschooled at Bryher's home and adopted by her and her second husband, Scottish writer Kenneth Macpherson , in 1928.

In 1921 Bryher married the American writer Robert McAlmon , in 1927 Kenneth Macpherson; Both men were homosexual and the marriages were not love marriages but marriages of convenience . The situation got complicated when Macpherson HD's lover and she became pregnant by him. HD had the child aborted.

In the 1920s, Bryher lived in London and Paris, where she was part of the avant-garde literary scene and associated with Ernest Hemingway , James Joyce , Gertrude Stein , Sylvia Beach , Adrienne Monnier and Berenice Abbott . Bryher and McAlmon's small publisher Contact Editions specialized in books with no commercial opportunities. The publisher's most famous books were Hemingway's Three Stories & Ten Poems (1924) and Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans (1925).

Bryher was particularly interested in psychoanalysis and film art. In Vienna she met Sigmund Freud , she and HD traveled to Greece with the British sexual psychologist Havelock Ellis in 1920, and in Berlin she met the film directors Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Sergej Eisenstein . From 1927, Bryher's contacts, especially with the German film world, became closer. 1927-1933 Bryher and McPershon published Close Up, the first magazine that dealt with the history and theory of film, but also published film reviews. The literary magazine Life and Letters Today published by Bryher published the poems of HD. In 1930, Bryher and her husband produced the experimental film Borderline with Paul Robeson and HD in the leading roles.

From 1929 Bryher lived with her mother, her husband Macpherson, HD and Perdita, first in Territet on Lake Geneva , then mostly in their Villa Kenwin (named after "Kenneth" and "Winifred"), which was built by Alexander Ferenczy and Hermann Henselmann in a radically modern Bauhaus style. ) in La Tour-de-Peilz near Vevey, which should be an ideal space for living and working, for creative work, concerts and parties.

In the 1930s and during World War II, Bryher and Gertrude Stein's companion Alice B. Toklas supported many emigrants in their escape from the National Socialists, for example Gertrude Urzidil and Johannes Urzidil .

After World War II, Bryher published several historical novels as well as the autobiography The Heart to Artemis .

Works

  • Amy Lowell. A critical appreciation , 1918
  • Two Selves , novel, 1920
  • Development , novel, 1923
  • West , 1925
  • Civilians , 1926
  • Film problems of Soviet Russia , 1929
  • The Player's Boy , Roman, 1953
  • The Fourteenth of October , Roman, 1952 (German sword and rose , 1955)
  • Roman Wall , Roman, 1954 (German: The Roman Wall , 1956)
  • Beowulf , Roman, 1956
  • Gate to the Sea , 1958
  • Ruan , 1960
  • The Heart to Artemis , autobiography, 1962
  • Visa for Avalon , 1965
  • The coin of Carthage , 1965
  • This January tale , 1966
  • The colors of Vaud , 1969
  • The days of Mars. A memoir. 1940-1946 , 1972
  • Analyzing Freud. The Letters of HD, Bryher, and Their Circle , Briefwechsel, ed. by Susan Stanford Friedman

literature

  • Humphrey Carpenter: Geniuses together. American writers in Paris in the 1920s . Uwin Hyman, London 1987, ISBN 0-04-440067-5
  • Robert McAlmon: Being Geniuses Together. 1920-1930 . North Point Press, San Francisco 1968
  • Adrienne Monnier: Notes from the Rue de l'Odéon. Writings 1917-1953 . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-458-16692-0
  • Andrea Weiss: Paris was a woman. The women from the Left Bank. Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein & Co. , new edition. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 978-3-499-24224-3

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James Donald, Anne Friedberg, Laura Marcus (eds.): Close Up 1927-1933. Cinema and Modernism , Princeton Univ. Press 1999, p. 315.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bryher
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ellerman, Annie Winifred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Margate , Kent
DATE OF DEATH January 28, 1983
Place of death Vevey , Canton of Vaud