UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · FICTION · HISTORY
Bryher
Also known as: Annie Winifred Ellerman
Annie Winifred Ellerman (2 September 1894 – 28 January 1983), known by the pen name Bryher, was an English novelist, poet, memoirist, magazine editor, and a member of the Ellerman ship-owning family. She was a major figure of the international set in Paris in the 1920s, using her fortune to help many struggling writers. With her lover H.D. and the Scottish writer Kenneth Macpherson, she launched the film magazine Close Up, which introduced Sergei Eisenstein’s work to British viewers. From her home in Switzerland, she helped to evacuate Jews from Nazi Germany, and then became an historical novelist.
Master Awsten was lying in a great bed with painted hangings.
— from The Player's Boy
Most acclaimed
Roman Wall
The story takes place seventeen hundred years ago around Aventicum and Orba, a lonely Swiss outpost of the Roman Empire. Valerius wonders if the storm will break before he can marry and retire, Demetrius, an old Greek farmer hurries on the last journey home to Italy and Vinodius squanders resources on a public holiday all the while as an empire around them collapses.
The Player's Boy
James Sands anticipates a glorious career as apprentice to an Elizabethan theater troupe. He plays Bellario in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, and in this cherished role, experiences the fusion of his passion and his art. But when Sands' masters die, the young player loses his home and his job, and must fight to maintain his loyalty in an atmosphere of plague, Puritanism, and political unrest. After one small act of kindness threatens to engulf Sands in violence, the hope of his former life spirals into a horror that contemporary readers will find disturbingly familiar. "An English novelist and patron of artists such as H.D., Bryher (Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983) first published this beautifully realized story of a young Elizabethan actor's apprentice in 1953. After the death of James Sands's beloved Master Awsten, one of the Queen's Players who has taught Sands the rudiments of acting, Sands travels from Southwark, London and passes through a succession of employers. At a house in the country, he meets the summering playwright Frances Beaumont, in the process of writing his play Philaster. James wins the part of Bellario, the girl page disguised as a boy for love of Philaster, who in a curious royal ménage-a-trois sends Bellario to serve his beloved Arethusa; James duly falls in love, unrequitedly, with Beaumont's virginal fiancée, Ursula. History intrudes offstage in the form of Sir Walter Ralegh's execution and the ascent of the Puritans, and James, now a clerk, becomes a kind of poignant anachronism, too delicate for the coarsening new age. Theatrical and romantically lyrical, Bryher's novel is a forgotten gem, channeling the servant boy's first person flawlessly." — Publishers Weekly (July 10, 2006) "A striking and beautifully written narrative … Bryher is a fine artist with words, extraordinarily skillful in her magical ability to capture the essence of an individual emotion and the quality of a national mood." — The New York Times
The Coin of Carthage
Two Greek traders adapt themselves to the fortunes of Rome and Carthage alternatively, in order to survive during the Second Punic War.