The Heart to Artemis

Book excerpt: Bryher (1894-1985)—adventurer, novelist, publisher—flees Victorian Britain for the raucous streets of Cairo and sultry Parisian cafes. Amidst the intellectual circles of the twenties and thirties, she develops relationships with Marianne Moore, Freud, Paul Robeson, her longtime partner H.D., Stein, and others. This compelling memoir, first published in 1962, reveals Bryher’s exotic childhood, her impact on modernism, and her sense of social justice by helping over 100 people escape from the Nazis. “A work so rich in interest, so direct, revealing, and, above all, thought-provoking that this reader found it the most consistently exciting book of its kind to appear in many years.”—The New York Times