Winifred Bryher

Novelist, poet, film critic, and memoirist Winifred Bryher was born in Margate, England. The eldest child and only daughter of Hannah Glover and shipping magnate Sir John Ellerman, she traveled widely and frequently visited her favorite island, located among the Isles of Scilly off the southwestern coast of England; she would later take the island’s name, Bryher, as her legal surname and pen name. Bryher is the author of more than 20 books, including The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoir (Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962), the novel The Player’s Boy (Pantheon Books, 1953), the critical text Film Problems of Soviet Russia (Riant Chateau, 1929), and her poetry collection Region of Lutany (Chapman & Hall, 1914).

Bryher is well-known as Hilda Doolittle’s partner of around 40 years; Doolittle is better known by her pen name, H.D. Bryher had memorized H.D.’s poems before requesting a meeting with the poet in July of 1918, which led to an invitation to tea and the beginning of a creative and romantic relationship. The two cohabitated and often traveled through Europe together. Bryher adopted H.D.’s daughter, Perdita, and named her as her heir. 

Bryher used her wealth to fund the lives and projects of several artists and writers of the modernist era, including William Carlos Williams’s Contact Press, which he cofounded with Bryher’s first husband Robert McAlmon; Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare & Company; Edith Sitwell; and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. With her second husband, Kenneth Macpherson, who was also a lover of H.D.’s, Bryher started POOL productions, which produced several avant-garde films, among which only Monkeys’ Moon (1929) and Borderline (1930), starring H.D., survive in their entirety. 

In the early 1930s, Bryher and Macpherson built Villa Kenwin in La Tour-de-Peliz, Switzerland. During World War II, Bryher used the funds from her inheritance and her well-situated home to provide safe passage to more than 100 Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi regime, with theorist and poet Walter Benjamin among them. Bryher, Macpherson, H.D., and Perdita all lived at Villa Kenwin at various points in time until it was only Bryher who remained, living and writing there until she died in 1983.