Narthex and Other Stories

Fiction. Edited with an Afterword by Michael Boughn. Primarily known as a poet, H.D. was also a prolific prose writer. In fact her writing career began with the publication of children's stories in Sunday school magazines. She wrote several novels, only two of which were published in her lifetime, and a number of short stories and novellas, some of which were published under pseudonyms. Two of the three stories reprinted here for the first time were published in the 1920s under the names Rhoda Peters and D. A. Hill in Pagany and Life and Letters Today. The third story—really a novella—was published in Alfred Kreymborg's anthology The Second American Caravan in 1928 and has been unavailable ever since. These stories offer a remarkable insight into H.D.'s thinking as she struggled to develop her work at a transitional time in her life.

"This is H.D. at her best, speaking, making real for us the range of feeling of those possibilities at the edge of our known and defined experience which have not been spoken before. It is what I have called to myself the 'courage of the tenuous'—the quality in her which has most value for me as an artist, especially as a woman artist; the willingness to speak of what cannot be proved. What cannot, even, to be pointed to in the consensus world we precariously share with each other."—Diane Di Prima