"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 DuPlessis, 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 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.

The connections and interconnections of past and present––the realization that life is a whole continuously echoing back to the past and unfolding toward the future––were sources of the strength, renewal, and joy celebrated in H.D.'s Trilogy and, in a differing, but no less real way, in The Gift––her novelistic memoir of childhood. In recapturing her memories of being a very little girl in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and later on a country place outside Philadelphia, H.D. "let the story tell itself or the child tell it." It is this voice or child's-eye view that lends The Gift its special charm as H.D. recreates the ordinary and extraordinary occasions of her early youth, the nightmares and delights. A road-company presentation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Christmas Eve with its particular family ritual, a family outing, a disturbing accident––the happenings and incidents, perceptions and misconceptions with which a child's life is crowded are the substance of this most winning book. As she did for the H.D. novel HERmione, H.D.'s daughter, Perdita Schaffner, provides a fine introduction.

"What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) developed into an expansive and unique quest for a poetics that would fuel Duncan's great work into the 1960s and 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the writings of H.D., Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and many others, Duncan's wide-ranging work is especially notable for illuminating the role women played in creating literary modernism"--From publisher description.

"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 DuPlessis, 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 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.

"Bringing together Writing on the Wall, composed some ten years after H.D's stay in Vienna, and Advent, a journal she kept at the time of her analysis there, Tribute to Freud offers a rare glimpse into the consulting room of the father of psychoanalysis. It may also be the most intimate of H.D.'s works.Compelled by historical as well as personal crises, the poet worked with Freud during 1933-34. The streets of Vienna were littered with tokens dropped like confetti on the city, stating Hitler gives work. Hitler gives bread. Having endured World War I, she was now gathering her resources to face the second cataclysm she knew was approaching. In analysis, Hilda Doolittle explored her Pennsylvania childhood, her relationship with Ezra Pound (inventory of her nom de plume H.D.), Havelock Ellis, D.H. Lawrence, her ex-husband Richard Aldington, and subsequent companion Winifred Ellerman ( Bryher ), as well as her own creative processes.Freud, regarding H.D. as a student as well as a patient, wads hardly the detached presence one might imagine. Revealed here in the poet's words and in his own letters, which comprise an appendix, is the considerate friend, the charming Viennese gentleman--art collector, dog lover, wit--and the pioneer, always revising his ideas and possessed of an insight that could be terrifying in its force."--Publisher's description.

They had been engaged for a period, and what began as a brief romance developed into a lifetime's friendship and collaboration in poetry. Throughout the reminiscence runs H. D's conviction that her life and Pound's had been irrevocably entwined since those early days when they had walked together in the Pennsylvania woods and he wrote for her verse after William Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Chaucer. Twenty-five of these poems, handbound in vellum by Pound and called "Hilda's Book," are published here for the first time as an epilogue to this important and moving document.