H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

Lara Vetter is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and her books include A Curious Peril: H. D.’s Late Modernist Prose (2017).

"Lara Vetter’s engaging and well-paced H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), part of Reaktion Books’ series of concise biographies." - Hilary Holladay, The Gay and Lesbian Review"[An] acute, compact biography [written] with exquisite delicacy . . . The life that mattered was in the perpetual motion of creation that made biography problematic. She created herself in her writing about her analysis of Freud, about mythology, religion, and a range of ancient and modern subjects that has made it difficult for her biographer to pin down her subject. To Ms. Vetter’s credit, she does not discount the difficulty . . . Such admissions ought to weaken the biographer’s authority, but in Ms. Vetter’s case the opposite is true because she is as supple as her subject." - New York Sun"A compelling introduction to this most fascinating life." - Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars"Lara Vetter’s elegantly compact biography of modernist poet H.D. opens tantalizingly. What follows is a lively introduction to the remarkable life of a bold, brave, and visionary woman. Written for a broad audience, H.D. is the story of how the girl Hilda Doolittle grew up to become the writer, H.D., one of the greatest modernist American poets of the twentieth century." - Cynthia Hogue, author of Instead, It Is Dark (poems) and In June the Labyrinth (poems)

• IntroductionChapter 1: ‘Inexorably entangled’, 1886–1911Chapter 2: ‘My pencil run riot!’, 1911–14Chapter 3: 'The black cloud fell’, 1914–18Chapter 4: ‘To make a self’, 1919–26Chapter 5: ‘The perfect bi-’, 1927–39Chapter 6: ‘This is not writing . . . this is burning’, 1939–46Chapter 7: ‘Content, besieged with memories, like low-swarming bees’, 1946–61ReferencesSelect BibliographyAcknowledgementsPhoto Acknowledgements