Richard Aldington & H.D.

📖 The Scoop

In May 1929 Richard Aldington wrote to his wife and life-long friend, Hilda Doolittle, known to the world as the poet H.D.: 'You've got a rare, wonderful genius, and you can impose it. It's the most marvellous help to me to feel that you're "with me". Whatever happens, don't let us get separated again.'. Ironically, over the next thirty-two years they were often separated - by divorce, by continents and oceans, and finally in 1961, by death itself. But throughout their lives they wrote to each other frequently about their work, their friends - Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence among them - their children, lovers and companions, and their tempestuous and complex love for each other. Both were pioneers in Modernist literature and participants in the Imagist movement of 1912. H.D.'s early verse established her reputation as a female writer at the forefront of experimental expression. Her work was revealing, often autobiographical and examined her artistic and sexual relationships with both men and women. Richard Aldington was a poet, novelist and translator as well as a biographer who alienated the British establishment with his acerbic Lawrence of Arabia. Drawing on Aldington's and H.D.'s intimate correspondence between 1929 and 1961, Zilboorg explores their personal and professional lives, their friendships, and topics which concerned them both: cultural identity, sexuality, and the role of literature in the modern world. The letters collected together reveal an intimate portrait of one of this century's most fascinating literary couples and it is impossible not to be caught up in the narrative of this complex and moving relationship.

Genre: Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures (fancy, right?)