Asphodel

By H.D.

Book Overview

"DESTROY," H.D. had pencilled across the title page of this autobiographical novel. Although the manuscript survived, it has remained unpublished since its completion in the 1920s. Regarded by many as one of the major poets of the modernist period, H.D. created in Asphodel a remarkable and readable experimental prose text, which in its manipulation of technique and voice can stand with the works of Joyce, Woolf, and Stein; in its frank exploration of lesbian desire, pregnancy and motherhood, artistic independence for women, and female experience during wartime, H.D.'s novel stands alone.
A sequel to the author's HERmione, Asphodel takes the reader into the bohemian drawing rooms of pre-World War I London and Paris, a milieu populated by such thinly disguised versions of Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, May Sinclair, Brigit Patmore, and Margaret Cravens; on the other side of what H.D. calls "the chasm," the novel documents the war's devastating effect on the men and women who considered themselves guardians of beauty. Against this riven backdrop, Asphodel plays out the story of Hermione Gart, a young American newly arrived in Europe and testing for the first time the limits of her sexual and artistic identities. Following Hermione through the frustrations of a literary world dominated by men, the failures of an attempted lesbian relationship and a marriage riddled with infidelity, the birth of an illegitimate child, and, finally, happiness with a female companion, Asphodel describes with moving lyricism and striking candor the emergence of a young and gifted woman from her self-exile.
Editor Robert Spoo's introduction carefully places Asphodel in the context of H.D.'s life and work. In an appendix featuring capsule biographies of the real figures behind the novel's fictional characters, Spoo provides keys to this roman clef.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822312425
• ISBN13: 9780822312420
• Release Date: August 1992
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

H.D. Through the Looking Glass

With _Asphodel_, Hilda Doolittle takes her readers across the Atlantic and introduces them to the literati of the early twentieth century. Her thinly veiled portrayals of Ezra Pound, Dorothy Shakespear, William Carlos Williams, and D.H. Lawrence are insightful and perhaps far more accurate than any biography would dare to be. While it is difficult to believe that she was as naive an ingenue as she attests, it is harder still not to sympathize with the youthful poet determined to succeed abroad even though discarded by the charming but inattentive Pound. This novel is one of H.D.'s best, clearly as strong an example of her writing as _Bid Me to Live_ and _Paint it Today_. While still not consdered a first-rank Modern, Hilda Doolittle is arguably one of the most important literary figures of her day. Her description of the Moderns abroad is flawless and no examination of the Modern era can be complete before reading her prose.