HERmione

Reviews

"She showed a way to penetrate mystery; which means, not to flood the darkness with light so that darkness is destroyed, but to enter into darkness, mystery, so that it is experienced." — Denise Levertov

"The work of an imagination that incorporates boldly the modern consciousness and aesthetic and the traditional, psychoanalytic realism and hermetic visionary experience of a passionate life in its old age." — Robert Duncan

"H.D. renders the past with hallucinogenic distortion, in pulsing poetic prose. This is a coming-of-age narrative told at a slant, in which people harden into marble statues, and curtains extend for miles in blue diagonals." — Charlie Tyson, The New Yorker

"In some ways, HERmione can be seen as an author’s attempt to rewrite her own genesis, to make her development as a poet a more important story than a christening over tea at the British Museum." — Tyler Malone, Poetry Magazine

"HERmione’s retrospective scavenging and rummaging is a masterpiece...we see an unusually unguarded and even lushly romantic side of H.D., as well as a sense of immediacy and presence in space characteristic of her early poetry. This reprint is a gem for H.D. enthusiasts, but it’s also just a pleasure to read, one of the most inviting and, in the author’s mercy for her younger proxy, most generous of her prose works. " — Holly Raymond, The Poetry Project

"As Francesca Wade writes in her excellent afterword, included in New Directions’ recent reissue, the novel, as a piece of early autofiction, is H.D.’s “reckoning,” her search for “a voice” as she rails against the labels and strictures of a world that fails to understand her. I am not an imagist, nor wife, nor daughter, nor muse, HERmione asserts. I am only myself, however mutable or imperfect that self may be." — Ella Fox-Martens, The Baffler

"Having HERmione back in print makes it possible, therefore, to better read (and teach, and grasp) modernist, lesbian and coming-of-age literature....The 2022 edition retains [H.D.'s] foreword, but brings it into conversation with a compelling afterword by Francesca Wade, who refocuses the text on H. D. and allows the author to speak for herself." — Noreen Masud, TLS

"H.D.’s work at its best has the peculiar power of evanescing the contingent into something shimmering, a ‘continual allegory’ in Keats’s sense, both immanent and renewable. Hers is a poetry close to ritual invocation, resistant to the one-damn-thing-after-another offered by conventional biography. As Susan Howe wrote, in a tribute to H.D. on the centennial of her birth, ‘ecstasy is outside time.'" — Maureen McLane, LRB

"This welcome new edition underscores the importance of the novel’s initial rediscovery and signals that it’s time for HERmione to solidify its reputation as an important lesbian novel and feminist literary touchstone—and to be duly acknowledged as many other things as well: a crucial corrective for some of the founding myths of modernist poetry, an American female bildungsroman, and a central work by a distinctive voice in experimental modernist fiction." — Annie Finch, Liber