The gift: the complete text

Abstract

In this complete, unabridged edition of H.D.'s visionary memoir, The Gift, Jane Augustine makes available for first time text as H.D. wrote it and intended it to be read, including H.D.'s coda to book, her Notes, never before published in its entirety. Written in London during blitz of World War II, The Gift re-creates peaceful childhood of Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where she was born in 1886. As an antidote to war's destructiveness, H.D. invokes mystical Moravian heritage of her mother's family to convey an ideal world peace and salvation that would come through spiritual power of women - a power that also endowed her with the gift of her own art. The Gift is key to intertextual studies of H.D.'s wartime oeuvre and to an understanding of religious and gender concerns pervading her later work, especially 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 definitive edition of The Gift, essential to students and scholars of H.D., modernism, and feminist literature.