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"The
Gift" by H.D.
The
Complete Text
Edited and
Annotated by Jane Augustine
Order
this Book now
In this complete, unabridged edition of H.D.'s visionary memoir, The
Gift, Jane Augustine makes available for the first time the
text as H.D. wrote it and intended it to be read, including
H.D.’s coda to the book, her "Notes," never before
published in its entirety.
Written in London during the blitz of World War II, The Gift
re-creates the peaceful childhood of Hilda Doolittle in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where she was born in 1886. As an
antidote to war’s destructiveness, H.D. invokes the mystical
Moravian heritage of her mother's family to convey an ideal world
peace and salvation that would come through the spiritual power
of women--a power that also endowed her with "the gift"
of her own art.
Although H.D.’s androgynous signature first associated her
with early 20th-century Imagist poetics, The Gift
exemplifies her continuing innovations in prose. She uses the
child-voice, flashback, and stream-of-consciousness techniques
reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Dorothy
Richardson, but expands the genre of memoir through
free-associative meditations on myth and her lengthy essayistic
"Notes" on Moravian history, emphasizing the pioneer
missionaries' rapport with Native Americans.
The Gift is key to intertextual studies of H.D.’s
wartime oeuvre and to an understanding of the religious and
gender concerns pervading her later work, especially the
women-centered poems Trilogy and Helen in Egypt.
Augustine’s introduction and annotations, based on extensive
research in Moravian archives, provide a biographical and
historical context to make this the definitive edition of The
Gift, essential to students and scholars of H.D., modernism,
and feminist literature.
Jane Augustine is associate professor of English
and humanities at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, and has
held the H.D. Fellowship in American Literature at Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, the site of H.D.'s
collected papers.
1998. 384
pp. 6 X 9.
Notes,
bibliography, index.
ISBN
0-8130-1644-4
Cloth, $55.00
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"Psychologically complex memoir of her childhood in London -- to which she expatriated in her early teens -- as WWII's bombs rained down. There are some shattering scenes of London during the Blitz as H.D. describes her terror, the calm between raids and her consequent gratefulness for everyday occurrences. . . . The book owes much to her spell as apprentice to and analysand of Sigmund Freud. . . . Augustine's well-researched scholarly edition restores the text to its full length and includes H.D.'s own notes." --
Publishers Weekly
"This significant primary source will be valued by students of modernism and feminist literature." --
Choice
"It is a special joy to have the
complete text of The Gift, a stunning work in the H.D.
canon, a work of import for studies in autobiography and the
essay, for understanding the spiritual crisis of modernism, and
as a climactic work in the career of an extraordinary
20th-century woman writer."--Rachel Blau DePlessis,
Temple University
"All students and teachers of American literature will value
this book for the light it throws on the poet who is, I believe,
the most important female poet in America since Emily Dickinson,
and indeed the most important female poet writing in the English
language during the 20th century."--Louis L. Martz,
Yale University
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