HERmione

by H.D.[Hilda Doolitle]

Book by H. D

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Classics, LGBT, Queer, Feminism, 20th Century

238 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1981

Reviews

[Mariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something crept, always crept between her and everybody... everybody?

I know the feeling....

I loved the introduction from H.D.'s daughter Frances Perdita Schaffner. It tilted the view, it changed where tiny boxes to keep what tiny things in went, tiny precious things and such a small thing and on high shelves. Not so small at all. Unmarked and can't throw away. Two mothers. Named Frances for who will be Fayne in the novel and Perdita. The dedication reads to "To F...... for September 2nd." It was her birthday. She was hauled away while her mother released or pinned (I could see it being both) on pages behind closed doors. Shakespearean like Hermione. Written words on the wall and above. She read her mother's book, abandoned when it ended. I could see past its end in her dark room. When Hermione thinks "so she must have laughed like that" when her mother tells her what her mother said to her when she laughed as Hermione does now (then). So she must have loved the tiny one, pushed aside the tiny one and forgotten for daylight star-signs and dreams. The past is the past is the past. So she must have felt these things, captured this way, named like that. It is in her book that was made by going away to before, when she laughed like that. I may have tried to step outside of her own knobbling door knocking without this outside and out of time look from her daughter. I wanted to see everyone Her meets in Her own eyes. When she was naming. I can see who is outside the door in the dark room this way.

Names are in people; people are in names. God is in a word. God is in HER.

They call her Undine, or The Little Mermaid. She would give it all for feet. Or she would give it all for a voice. Both could carry you far, if you had somewhere to go. Born Hermione Gart in Pennsylvania. H.D. was born a tiny baby in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. H.D. and H.G. in places with names of other places. I liked that they called their family home the "Gart Grange". Hermione Granger from Harry Potter was named so because JK Rowling was worried about know-it-all little girls with (no resemblance to any living intended) buck teeth would be mocked. Little Hermione girls in the shadows of their literary namesakes. Nothing like the sun-burst lilies. Lilies of all kinds. Flowers are for pressing in books as fading scented love mementos. Hermione looks for Her and she looks away, dropping the books with their naming words like staring at the sun for too long. So many secrets in their pages. It is a watershed. Drowned lilies in their bowls. Everyone has a flower. Spying not-sister Minnie is a zinnia and in my head a love-me-not. She not-dies all of the time with her tyrannical headaches and phantom rich aunts from Northern Philadelphia. Perhaps she is allergic to pollen. Home is home and not-home with this zinnia weed growing in her path.

Hermione quit Bryn Mawr college. I would like to know what the Bryn Mawr accent that the other girls affected sounded like. My imagination suggests a cross between Madonna's transatlantic accent and old timey movie actresses who didn't sound like they came from anywhere. Arriving to "see" who she must see. Drowning in eye pools you must see. Arriving past she was a failure. Late for the doors closing. She made music behind closed doors. Hermione only wants a hound of her own. She has the dog that smells like the zinnia. She could kick him away. Dogs roam in the woods behind closed doors. Dream dogs and constellations. Trees just right for Sylvania stand rooted and touch the signs. Everyone and everything has its hand out for a name. You could come along with so and so to place or so in Europe. You must come. A name like a suffix to end theirs as a tag along. I see her two love relationships with Fayne and George as some word part like how she is HER instead of Hermione. Who? Her. She's coming. You must come.

Real life Ezra Pound is named as the harlequin George Lowndes. His mouth opens red and wide, swallowing. His pound of flesh buys you thoughts. It laughs at jokes before you know if they are funny, will be funny one day, will never be funny...anymore. It speaks in the voice of Uncle Sam when it wants to. I thought "THIS is the guy?" Her eyes would have seen me taking her mother's disapproving side. She becomes his little doll to fit inside his Russian doll. It's an accent that sounds Russian-like, like place or so in Lithuania. Everything is with an accent. I love you, I must marry you. THIS is the guy? But his lips just move.

What would Hermione look like to me if I could look at her in her own eyes? Him I love, her I love, I love, I love, I love... With an accent. I have a feeling I'd see my own reflection of having never been in love. Only wished I was in love or tried to not be in love, grateful for not having been in love.

I feel sad for H.D. when I read the excerpt in the back from her biography about Ezra Pound. He could turn her Sylvania wood into his walking stick and bang all of the floors, tables and drums with his dictions. Her home without a home will be a tribe without a people. You'll spoil everything. Leave Frances Gregg. You'll spoil everything. H.D. with a baby that wasn't his. H.D. was alone to write her book. Well, not alone. There was the kid, and there was the other woman who forbade mention of Frances Gregg because she was "dangerous". What would she ruin? I see a lot of they love me, they love me not, they love me not... wishing. For both ends. What else would they do if they were not naming? They pinned to pages. When did Hermione live when she was not pin(n)ing?

The voice that was the voice of Fayne was the voice of a hurt little thing, a wild little goat, a small thing cooped up in a cage. The voice was a frightened cooped-up voice. Because of the voice, Her answered "Yes. It must be awful for you. Teaching all day and then having people like me- like me-" The voice that was a small goat voice said from somewhere "Oh mama, can't you see her?"

I loved it when she imagines the eyes of their cook, Mandy, in Egyptian sculptures, in other time places, secrets of another world. She isn't taking Mandy and putting her there. Mandy is a fixed spot to stand still and fly to someone else, some possible other place. I know that Her didn't mean to pin because I did not feel that way because of how the feeling is caught breathlessly in her. It's not a suffix or a prefix person to take with you if they are still there. Her wants to tell Mandy what she is thinking of but she never can because you aren't supposed to do that. That's when I felt fixed. I wanted someone to take Her with them, like when her brother used to give her books like Jane Eyre, before he found his restful place in mathematics. I guess it's like how you want to be noticed and you also don't want to be noticed. It's no good if they don't do it right. Come with us! But don't say come with us as an afterthought. I had had a lot of thoughts about being swallowed by harlequin dolls. They sure had big "of "love". My older sister collected those when we were growing up. I'd stare at them on her dresser as she held court over us. They would totally swallow you. It's hard and breakable inside. It's fancy. It knows what it is going to say before it says it and still you are an after thought. That's the worst.

My New Directions copy I bought online and used. There's an inscription from "Christmas 1997" inside that I liked.
"Erin- This writer crystallizes so much more than just feminism. Better call her human; she expresses the frantic and the lost and elation of life in a way that suits this time in our lives. I know you will appreciate her words. Sam."

It must say a lot about me that I was caught behind the door of Her, Her, Her and not One I love, Two I love, Three I love. Elation was my confusion and I wanted that hound too. Not one that smells of someone else.

My sister got defensive on the behalf of Eric when I (I guess I sounded accusing) lamented that they gave up their copy. There was also an antique post card with a message from Sam about carefully deciding which friend would most appreciate this book that they were so happy to have found. My sister was sure that some good reason must have come up to have had to have sold it. I also got a receipt from the Goodwill of New Jersey in the book that was signed by all of the employees like it was a yearbook. I love finding stuff in my books! It would be cool if all of those people had read and loved this book (like old library check-out cards when you'd see the same person's name on the slip repeatedly. If it was a really good book I'd get really happy that this person loved it so much they kept checking it out again). I guess the point of that little story is that I'm suspicious and I did not feel love from George and Fayne. Come with us, not asking.

I really loved this book. H.D. has this way of writing that goes in and out of things, as if feeling out. Pro nouns. Hoping, afraid to hope. Come with me, asking. It resonated with me this displacement and wanting/not wanting to be named, seen. Lilies of all kinds.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading this book was magical, and one can see H. D.'s growth as a female writer among mostly male counterparts—her characterization of George Lowndes (Ezra Pound) is particularly scathing in a lovingly oppressive way only H. D. can mange to convey; one can also see her emerging into a voice entirely her own, one more grounded in nature and indebted to Greek sources.

The real treasure in reading HERmione is that those who try to nicely pigeonhole H. D. into the category of "Imagist poet" will find this overturned, not only because her prose is so beautiful and bewitching, but because she is one of the most overlooked writers in literary modernism when it comes to prose.

Sadly, her prose is often overlooked in favor of her fine poetry, but HERmione is one of the best modernist novels of the mid-1920s and rightfully deserves to be on lists of major novels from this period alongside other giants like Woolf and Joyce.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

HERmione is a maelstrom of modernist word-vomit interspersed with blinding moments of clarity. I've typed out my favorite pages, 224 and 225, where H.D. has placed a panicking Her Gart, the main character, on a thawing frozen stream. H.D. uses this image as an allegory for the dangerous mental journey that Her has taken throughout HERmione. Her wanted to risk it all, even her own sanity, to find Her Truth, to become an individual, to preach her own ideas. After months of mental deterioration lit up by peaks of brilliance, Her held back at the last moment and broke free from her derangement. She was weak; she couldn't resist society's call any longer. She saved herself from insanity. Don't rock the boat.

But did Her really save herself? Did she really "break free"? Did she break free from insane creative brilliance and end up with mediocrity? Did she break free from individuality and accept social complacence? Did she break free from homosexuality and yield to heterosexuality? Her survives, but at the cost of her glimpses into spectacular mystic brilliance. Is stability worth it? The following passage argues "Maybe," but in the end H.D. declares "No." I'm with her.

As soon as Her seems to have decided for stability, Faye, her queer lover, returns in the novel's last paragraph, throwing Her's future up in the air once again. She's given no choice but to ask again if individuality and artistic brilliance are worth instability and abandoning her entire social world. When HERmione ends, Her is still stuck standing on the half-frozen stream, unsure whether to take the leap toward Her Truth or to crawl back to shore. I think many of us can sympathize.

"Now she stopped at a runnel that was frozen. Her toe hammered at the space of frozen surface. Then she stamped heavily with her heel. The heel made a sharp dent in the frosted ice. She stood with both feet on it. The opposite bank was shadowed with a tangle of old creeper. No snow covered the tiny beach under the cave space opposite. There might conceivably be just the beginnings of things, common chickweed or arbutus bud under that protective mat of creepers. She stamped further and found foothold. As Her swayed forward, the ice dipped. She heard faint reverberation, the frail thing breaking. It never does freeze properly. There's always water running. She stood wondering whether it would be better to step back or to leap and risk the breakage. The ice stood solid, did not dip further.

"The ice cracked as she made tentative slipping movement. The sound it gave out suggested something beneath hammering the undersurface. The slight jar brought Her to tension. She stood tense and silent, if she moved forward it would break now certainly. The bank opposite rose sheer up above the tangle. She wanted to touch the narrow black strip under the bank, was sure of finding something growing. Every year all my life, I have discovered something really in the winter. She remembered all those years, the first year she had actually found violets in December. Violets in December, part of last year? Part of next year? She stood part of next year, part of last year, not totally of either. The crack widened, actually snapped suddenly. The ice she stood on still held, did not dip further toward the tiny upward jet of running water. Reverberation cut like a white string, cut like a silver string. Winter branches etched above her head caught reverberation of ice breaking. Reverberation of the break seemed to be prolonged, would be till it touched stars. The stars invisible in daylight. Then her thought widened and the tension snapped as swiftly. It's like a violin string. It's like Fayne exactly.

"When she said Fayne a white hand took Her. Her was held like a star invisible in daylight that suddenly by some shift adjustment of phosphorescent values comes quite clear. Her saw Her as a star shining white against winter daylight.

"Her Feet were held, frozen to the cracked ice surface. Her heart was frozen, held to her cracked, somewhat injured body. I am glad I was ill. Her, though remembering illness, recalled the suffocation of steam heat, the fragrance of hothouse lilac. Whole lilac wafted ineffable remembrance. Like the super note on the violin strong, the thing in Her reverberated slightly. She shifted her feet, moved back, slid backward till her heels felt the frozen grass edge of the little river. Then she clambered self-consciously alert back toward the scrubby pathway. Oak saplings tore at skirt and rough coat."

[Bethany · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the kind of book that enchants me as much as it frustrates.

I really like stream-of-consciousness. One of my main problems is the lack of line breaks, especially when it concerns multiple-person dialogue. (I don't know if it's a rule set in stone, but it's just the way these types of things seem to be written.) Big blocks of text suffocate me. And when the language is complex, it makes it hard for me to focus.

Though I'm not really blaming the formatting as much as my lazy brain.

Actually, the slightly incoherent (but beautifully rendered) style made me think of the last part of Against the Wall by Kathleen Millay. Ha. What a helpful comparison, considering that book is way more obscure than HERmione.

I want to re-read this, over and over throughout the years. Until I can see and understand all its nuances. I have such conflicted emotions over what to rate this. It's definitely somewhere in between a 3 and a 4. I'll round down to squelch my predilection towards pretentiousness.

[Natalie]

My friend took me and showed me this hidden bookstore yesterday. It was in someones house a few suburbs away from me, and the man who owns it only opens it on the weekends. You walk in, and as someone who loves books, come close to passing out from the sheer joy of what rests on those grand shelves. You also get the impression that this man knows and loves them so well that he couldnt give a shit as to whether or not you buy them. Infact, he might prefer that you dont.

I found this book in this little shop.

[Hesper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phenomenological literature should be exempt from star ratings, shouldn't it? Yes, it's public, so it'll inevitably suffer from some kind of scrutiny, of evaluation, but can a chronicle of interior experience even be assessed by an outsider?

Maybe making a list will help.

One, this felt like I was reading the diary of someone writing in delirium. Two, it seems to exist in direct relation to H.D.'s poems, with the same reliance on elliptical repetitions and recurring images. Three, at heart it resembles a more dysfunctional (yes, more dysfunctional), less repressed Age of Innocence. Four, the prose is lyrical, experimental, complex, deceptive. Five, the lines between fiction and autobiography are blurred, were probably never clearly drawn, because they can't, in this instance, be.

I'm not sure that answers anything. It's a damn cool book, and it also kicks ass. Read it.

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Words were her plague and words were her redemption."

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

1987 me: 5 stars!!
2019 me: what is this hot mess? 2 stars. Maybe.

This book is so very very odd, I suppose it's what people call a "fever dream" book (or maybe a stoner fantasy), a stream-of-consciousness book, or a lyrical book, maybe?

Any passage from the book will do, but let me choose this one:

“Don’t you know what marriage means, Hermione?” “Marriage means me whirling like a waterspout, swirling out of everything, whirling over fences, out, out, out of the forest primeval” (she achieved the exact George Uncle-Sam-in-whiskers voice). “Pri-meval” (she repeated it), “I am going to whirl out of this the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks bearded with moss and with garments green indistinct in the twilight. I am indistinct in the twilight. I am going to swirl out, out.”

which reminds me so much of this H.D. poem:

Oread
Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir

(To be clear, there is no verse in this book, it's prose.)

I read this in my 20s (geez maybe I was still in my teens), and I loved it, so when Goodreads came along I rated it 5 stars and guessed at the year I read it. I'm rereading it now, and ... holy cow. I was a different person in my 20s. I had time to wander, time to meander, time to drill down, wayyyy deep down, into one thought and then another and another. I was patient, delighted to see where the path took me, no need of any particular direction. Now in my 50s and I have little patience with this stream of consciousness imagist meandering - this story had better start going somewhere!!!

One thing I still loved in my reread: there are a lot of flowers mentioned in this book; more than in any other book I've read that isn't actually about gardening. People are compared to flowers, people talk about flowers, people are the color of a flower, people send flowers ... hibiscus, water lily, fleur de lis, narcissus, lily of the valley, snowdrop, zinnia, cherry blossoms, violets, carnations, lilacs, roses, and more ... (and trees are not just "trees," they are oaks, spicebush, magnolia, pine, hemlock ...). The imagery really is lovely. H.D. is an imagist, always.

HERmione is semi-autobiographical, and I had been assuming that George Lowndes was her husband, George Aldington, but I learned that he is Ezra Pound, whom she had a relationship with (and was engaged to) but never married. Nellie Thorpe is Mary Herr, and Fayne Rabb is Frances Gregg.

And the first time I read this, I completely missed the subtext that Her/Hilda hooked up with Fayne/Frances.

[Magdalena en su sepulcro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un instante, una fracción infinitesimal de un instante y el amanecer fundiéndose en la mañana, como la luz de las estrellas reflejadas en el agua. Hay un estremecimiento, un ligerísimo escalofrío. Lo que era ya no es.
[...]
Aquello que recordaba se convertía en una especie de hecatombe, una pila de objetos, cosas con un significado simbólico determinado, con alguna función. […] La pila de objetos se convertía en una hecatombe que se ofrecía a un dios. Zeus o algunos de sus veloces hijos. En concreto, Hermes.

[Ada Mar · Rating 4 out of 5]

es como entrar en la cabeza de hilda, un lugar donde la palabra es creadora de mundos, donde las ideas se abren de repente, creando conexiones particulares que solo la memoria personal puede unir y mostrar. la verdad es q menudo cerebro gordo para escribir este libro.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

no clue what i read but the way language is used is so interesting to me

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Initially this seemed worth reading on the grounds that it is autobiographical, because I have been introduced to H.D. through her poems; her skills as a poet are reflected in the superb writing, which sustains interest regardless of plot, being beautiful, but it never seems to me to particularly address the origins of H.D.’s poetry; nor do I have great sympathy for the existential angst of a poor little rich girl, for the repeated snobbery of social class [is that the basis for Pound’s arrogant refinements of taste?] and the casual racism that scars so many American writers (the fish cannot see the water); instead it is an achievement in its own right as a novel, as an exercise in modernist writing, as an exercise in phenomenology, with the author’s own life as material more than as subject; I think it might be fruitful to place it alongside Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex [home of the semi-colon] as an existentialist work and, surely, a feminist one.

[Jennie Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's so impossible to give this a star rating. Her is intimate, subjective, fragile. It's filled with images & associations that hold immense significance to H.D's identify. It's like peering inside H.D's head. The stream of consciousness is more tangled and messy than what Woolf was able to achieve but I can't help admire Her/H.D for that reason alone.

[Andrea (abooksplace) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Demasiado preciosismo surrealista y por eso seguramente no del gusto de cualquiera, pero cuando lo atraviesas y te habituas, están los miedos y deseos de una adolescente que todas hemos sido alguna vez.

[Mic Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like taking acid, like changing bodies, like the feeling of dreaming with your whole body only to remember a certain colour and no sequence of events clearly… AND queer in an obsessive way.

[G · Rating 2 out of 5]

good to know that it's not just the male modernists who I can't read, it's all of them. the book is probably good though if you could get through it

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

heres how we are distracted" I noticed this book that GR recommended to me and remembered how once I was under the spell of HD who was the emblem of the forbidden to me. Reading this book I floundered. I am quite sure that it neither illuminated nor dispelled the enigma but I do remember it as one of those books that triggered or fed the melancholic in me.

So I put it on the must have another go, and though I finished it, I moved away from HD on with my main passion at the time, to read the entire collection of Anais Nin.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"People are in things, things are in people."
"I am out of the Temple Shakespeare."
"Words were her plague and words were her redemption."
"Nothing held her, she was nothing holding to this thing: I am Hermione Gart, a failure."
"It was necessary to hug this thing to herself. It was a weight holding her down, keeping her down. Her own name was a ballast to her lightheadedness."
"Gart and Gart sat facing Gart and Gart."

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I done left Miss Fayne all alone upstairs in your little workroom”

[Annabelle Hurst]

Dissociation in a book (idk if I spelled that right) and make it pretty. Hard to read like poetry but goooood.
If I read it for too long though at once I can’t think normally anymore so takes breaks

[Francisca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pienso que me habría gustado mucho más si mi concentración estival me hubiera dejado. Le daré otra oportunidad en el invierno.

[sarahjth · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is so interesting, but i am also so confused. so many things happen, and i feel like its so difficult to keep up, but i love it. definitely woudl recommend, but it is a challenge of a read.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

H.D. is a great writer, but this work is not her at her best. The novel HERmione is interesting, and parts of it do bring vividly to life the scenes characters and setting of the story. But H.D. tells much of this with a stream-of-consciousness technique that she is often not using effectively – too much indiscriminate repetition and even some instances of clumsily blatant word-association. This makes the character of Hermione Gart, though the book is from her point of view, rather vaguely drawn. Hermione is clearly intelligent, but her odd way of thinking comes off as a mixture of frivolity and half-madness. She seems absent-minded and her interior experience, which dominates the narration, detaches the reader from the here-and-now of the story without placing the reader in a space where something equally or more human is being communicated. Hermione is shown to intuit beads of the proto-mystical without it being made clear at any deep level what she means when she says things like, “I am Tree,” and “I am HER.”
This is the story of several months in the life of Hermione Gart, who has just failed college and come back to live at home for a while. Her boyfriend George, who is based on Ezra Pound, whom H.D. was herself dating when she was at her character’s age, is an eccentric intellectual snob, and Hermione has mixed feelings about him – she is lukewarm toward George. Then she is introduced at a party to a girl her age, Fayne, who is a weird and intense sort of visionary, and Hermione becomes very inspired by and attached to her. However, the contents and reality of this friendship are not depicted as thoroughly or as closely as would seem merited based on its central place in the story. The depths or deep places of this friendship is not a territory we are let into – even its deliria are abbreviated and strangely distanced from the book’s surface.
One of the things that is done well and in a lot of nuanced detail in this book, though, is the depiction of the social interactions among its characters, most of whom are women. (The character Hermione Gart has a keen sense of the psychological and manneristic minutiae of what goes on between people. Indeed, her vague inner life and hyper-sensed outer life make it odd that the emphasis should be tilted the way it is toward the internal. To be sure, there are places in this book where the refraction and radiation and involution of Hermione’s experience is done exquisitely well, the successfulness of it is just not a consistent thing.) (All that said, I have recently finished reading another novel by H.D., called Nights, and that one is brilliant and I would recommend it to high heaven.)

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read The Gift, an early work by her about her childhood. I didn't fully get it. Lehigh was having an anniversary lecture series about her. I went to a few of the events. So, it seemed time to give her another chance. I liked some of her poetry.

So, Hermione is about a young woman in her 20s at a moment of failure and transition, where she claims her identity. She is torn between George, or Ezra Pound and Fayne Rabb or Fayne Gregg. It is a very Modernist novel. There is some 'plot,' but it's mostly descriptions and allusions. If you consider reading it, think how you feel about Greek allusions and Shakespeare allusions and I'm sure other ones I'm missing. Like Itylus is mentioned. I'm sure there's a reason. And there are a couple of references to the Winter's Tale and Hermione who becomes a statue. Think Eliot, Think Woolf, think Joyce. She also writes very well about nature. Has a lot of lovely descriptions about flowers and trees and many good images. And interestingly enough, this work was discovered posthumously, so didn't exist to the world before 1981. And is not mentioned in the Harold Bloom collected essays in 1988. Also, interestingly enough, H.D. did psychoanalytical work with Freud and wrote about it. (Which I will read at a latter date). Oh, there's also some very arty sex scenes. So I liked it, but I've also been reading it since March.

I would give it 4 stars as in it's interesting, but not an easy read. It's one of those I would like to take a class in as opposed to reading it on my own. I may be doing some research later.

[K.m. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is poetry of words, play in words. H.D. runs and frolics with words like Nabokov, with a little bit of Lewis Carroll thrown in. But it also takes a more sinister turn. Words can cover over, become an obsession, they can obscure, or become senseless. The plot is not described, but submerged in a soup of words filling Hermione's brain. HERmione, or Her, becomes progressively more disconnected from the meaning of her words, her recitations and repetitions becoming ever more poetic as they lose attachment to the concrete world. Words are Her's (yes, that is jarring and oddly pleasing) medium, her realm of existence, having an almost mystical power over her.

"I have tasted words, I have seen them"

[c · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fiery tryst between a woman who is HER and the word AUM which is in God, who is herself a binomial conic section, a man who simply could never love a tree properly, and a woman who is, through virtue of being in things, part of HER.

A very insular novel. The language is the main focus, and I found that the different phrases and overall style of storytelling ranged from irritating (repetition on repetition) to briefly sublime (when the narrator describes a change in thought in terms of shapes and shifting, perfect surfaces [there is a lot of abstract thing X described in relation to Y, to varying degrees of success]).

[Jesse]

"Although experimental in ways that seem typically Modernist, this fictional work bears little resemblance, by opposition rather than imitation, to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." -Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank

[Ellie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The prose structure is somehow very frustrating, but in 7 years since first reading this, I never forgot the amazing strangeness of it.

[sam °❀⋆.ೃ࿔* · Rating 3 out of 5]

autistic-bisexual-magical-girl coded

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Flies buzzed negligently over wild carrot, and Queen Anne's lace lay powder-green and powder-mauve in heavy shadow... This summer was to have been her glory. This summer was to have been the summer, the summer for reflection, for a drawing together... the hard-earned olive chaplet. Nike, Athene gave her nothing... Love had not yet touched her. Gods stood far off" (9).

This one is for the hardcore modernists, not for the faint of heart. At this point, I would happily read the grocery lists of H.D.—I simply find her so fascinating.

The way in which her thoughts appear on the page—repeating and fragmenting extracts of literature, phrases overheard from acquaintances, and elements of liturgy or Biblical quotations—is simultaneously disorienting and comforting. My mind works in a similar manner, grappling to make sense of observations and patterns, doggedly carrying the past into the present.

"One conversation of all the conversations may retain significance; by one leaf you may judge the contour of a great tree, whether it be oak, or beech or chestnut. One conversation can give clue to the whole insistencies of a forest... the soil was ripe for a new sort of forestation" (54-55).

Probably the most overtly queer text by H.D. with autobiographical references to her lover Frances Gregg (as Fayne) and the repeated framing of the text's protagonist as "Her" (rather than "she" or "I"), playfully challenging grammar and the era's perceptions of love and the self: "So I am. I suppose I am that. Sometimes when gull wings beat across the counterpane, I know she loved me" (203).

Balances the tenderness of H.D.'s dalliance with Ezra Pound (their brief engagement, kissing in the mossy forest, and "Your eyes, your dress, the woods and the moon are all in some conspiracy" [113]) with his pompous ridiculousness.

This key passage mirrors the literary project in its entirety: "Her said, for she was a fool out of Shakespeare and if she went on and on saying the same thing perhaps in time people would realize that the thing back of the thing was the thing that mattered" (194). Time and repetition yielding truth-telling and revelation.

As Aalia Jagwani aptly wrote in a review of HERmione for Cleaver Magazine, "I stopped trying to resist the confusion altogether, and started to read inside of it. It felt transformative."

I love that weird little books exist; it gives me hope to make a weird little book someday.

Rapt sentences, with a kinship to Stein and Woolf therein. Perfect novel to end my France idyll.

It felt right to use a Mainie Jellett Cubist postcard from Dublin as my bookmark. <3

"'Do birds make a certain mechanical flight toward autumn?' 'What, what, Hermione?' 'I was wondering about birds. Have they a special sort of flight toward autumn?'" (121).