Bryher

Two Greek traders adapt themselves to the fortunes of Rome and Carthage alternatively, in order to survive during the Second Punic War.

A priestess of ancient Paestum, a Greek settlement in Italy, plans a bold escape into exile and freedom for herself and her enslaved fellow citizens.

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 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.

Four men and women attempt an escape to legendary Avalon after "the Movement" threatens the liberty and comforts they have taken for granted.

Bryher — adventurer, novelist, publisher — flees Victorian Britain for the raucous streets of Cairo and the sultry Parisian cafes. Amidst the intellectual circles of the twenties and thirties, she develops relationships with her longtime partner H. D., and with Marianne Moore, Freud, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, and others. This compelling memoir reveals Bryher's exotic childhood, her impact on modernism, and her sense of social justice-helping over 100 people escape from the Nazis while fleeing the war herself "Bryher’s reputation as a writer rests on her postwar historical novels, but this portrait of a tumultuous era shows her passionate involvement in the present." — The New Yorker (September 18, 2006) Go to article. "Annie Winifred Ellerman, aka Bryher (1894-1983) was a modernist maverick: novelist, philanthropist, publisher (along with "husband of convenience" Robert McAlmon), proponent of psychoanalysis, and longtime partner of the poet H.D. Published in the U.S. in 1962, this beautiful, exacting memoir looks back on her English childhood ("I knew it mattered more if I were naughty on the Continent than at home because I discredited not only myself but every other English child"); her intellectual and political development; her and her family's penurious existence during WWI; her friendships and encounters with the likes of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Freud, Yeats, and many others; and her work smuggling Jews out of Germany and Austria during the Nazi reign. Bryher takes great pains to make clear how chance and the social mores of the time shaped her voice and creative drive, spending ample time on psychoanalysis, Elizabethan literature, and proto-Modernists like Mallarmé. Eloquently and engagingly written, Bryher's memoir will be attractive to anyone with an interest in modernism's development and personalities." — Publishers Weekly (July 10, 2006) "A walk with Bryher down the rue de l'Odéon in 1921, besides being invigorating and fresh, can end with the realization of just how art became the hope of a generation disillusioned by war, systems of government, and moral failure." — Grace Schulman "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