Beowulf: A Novel of the London Blitz

Bryher, née Winifred Ellerman, (1894-1983) was an author, philanthropist and activist who published several historical novels, of which Beowulf is the first, originally published in France in 1948 and subsequently in English in 1956 by Pantheon Books. Her other historical novels include The Roman Wall, Coin of Carthage, and The Player's Boy, as well as two memoirs, A Heart to Artemis and Days of Mars. She adopted the name Bryher after an island off the coast of England in order to disguise her gender as a writer. In addition to her own work, Bryher was best known as the lifelong companion of the imagist poet H.D.. Lesser known is the fact that before and during World War II, Bryher assisted a great number of artists, writers and psychologists to escape from Nazi-held territories, among them Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Max Ernst, and many others. She also wrote and co-directed with her husband Kenneth Macpherson the avant garde silent film "Borderline," that starred Paul Robeson and H.D. Bryher and MacPherson co-founded the first english-language publication devoted to film criticism and theory, "Contact." She lived in Vevey, Switzerland. Susan McCabe was born in 1960 on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and has taught in Oregon and Arizona, and received her PhD at UCLA. She also taught and conducted research in her mother's country of Sweden. She directed the PhD in Literature and Creative Writing Program (2006-2009), and has been President of the Modernist Studies Association. She is the author of four books, including two critical studies--Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (Penn State University Press, 1994) and Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2005)--and two poetry volumes, Swirl (Red Hen Press, 2003), and Descartes' Nightmare (winner of the Agha Shahid Ali prize and published by Utah University Press in 2008). She is author of the upcoming dual biography: H.D. and Bryher: A Modernist Love Story, to be published by Oxford University Press.