"In the riveting and intense Bid Me to Live, H.D. documents her traumatic experiences during WWI on which she blamed a number of personal tragedies, including a stillborn child, the end of her marriage, and her pained relationship with D. H. Lawrence. This critical edition returns the novel to print for the first time in a generation ... Bid Me to Live is a roman à clef based on H.D.'s interactions with luminaries Richard Aldington, John Cournos, Dorothy Yorke, Lawrence, Cecil Gray, and Sigmund Freud, to name a few"-- back cover.

"...a thinly disguised roman à clef in which most of the leading members of London's Bloomsbury Group are easily identified: D. H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, Ezra Pound, English poet Richard Adlington and, in the character of the heroine Julia Ashton, H. D. herself. The time is World War I, the setting is the London of the 1917 air raids, and the theme the disintegration of love, undermined by the distant but ubiquitous war. Julia lives for her husband's brief leaves from the front, only to discover that he has transferred his sexual interest to an earlier mistress, Bella. Into Julia's crumbling, trancelike world enters Frederick, the fiery writer whose scandalous novels on the problems of sexuality no one dares publish. Not until she finally escapes the fog and fever of London for the quiet of Cornwall can Julia discern of face the truth about Frederick, and about herself."--cover