Bid Me to Live
H.D., edited by Caroline Zilboorg
Paper: $19.95
"Scholars and students alike will turn to Caroline Zilboorg’s edition of H.D.'s Bid Me to Live for an introduction that provides heretofore unavailable insights and annotations that elucidate the book's countless literary and biblical allusions. A useful, thorough, and eloquent study."--Michel W. Pharand, author of Bernard Shaw and the French
"Zilboorg's introduction and notes are excellent, thorough, and accurate--the work of an unparalleled expert in the field. This edition makes a major contribution to H.D. and modernist studies."--Jane Augustine, editor of H.D.'s The Mystery
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.
Editor Caroline Zilboorg offers invaluable background information and perspectives that facilitate a rich and rewarding reading of a complex novel. Including an introduction that recounts the autobiographical narrative on which the book is based, a biographical key to all the major characters, explanations of textual references, and photographs of all the central figures in the text, this is a powerful resource for understanding and appreciating one of the Imagist author's most accessible novels.
H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) is an American writer whose work exerted enormous influence on modernist poetry and prose.
Caroline Zilboorg is an independent scholar based in France. She is a life member of Clare Hall at Cambridge University and has published a number of books, including Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters.
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"In her scholarly treatment of H.D.'s book, Zilboorg brings together the fruits of the years of painstaking research and writing that she has devoted to the lives and works of H.D. and Richard Aldington, and, in so doing, provides the reader of this remarkable modernist work with the careful annotation and coherent exegesis it demands."
--Richard Aldington Newsletter
"In Caroline Zilboorg's new edition of Bid Me to Live , a roman à clef by the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)"
"… while the novel provides the voyeuristic pleasures of any good tell-all, it is more compelling when read as an exploration of the toll war takes on bodies, art, and even the most revolutionary of ideas."
"...beautifully written and heartbreaking novel …"
"… a meditation on grief and memory that leaves the reader less enthralled by the romance of war than unsettled by what is left behind."
--Emily Wojcik, Women's Review of Books
“Zilboorg’s excellent critical edition will help introduce this fascinating, much underrated modernist text to a new readership.”
--Modern Language Review
Bid Me to Live is [H.D.’s] finest and most moving novel, and Caroline Zilboorg’s elegant new scholarly edition is a timely reminder of why she was acclaimed for her sinuous prose, which wrestles compellingly with the fault lines of gender, sexuality and psychology, having also been the original imagist poet.
--Women: A Cultural Review