Bid Me To Live A Madrigal

Bid Me to Live (a Madrigal)

"...a thinly disguised roman à clef in which most of the leading members of London's Bloomsbury Group are easily identified: D. H. Lawrence, his wife Frieda, Ezra Pound, English poet Richard Adlington and, in the character of the heroine Julia Ashton, H. D. herself. The time is World War I, the setting is the London of the 1917 air raids, and the theme the disintegration of love, undermined by the distant but ubiquitous war. Julia lives for her husband's brief leaves from the front, only to discover that he has transferred his sexual interest to an earlier mistress, Bella. Into Julia's crumbling, trancelike world enters Frederick, the fiery writer whose scandalous novels on the problems of sexuality no one dares publish. Not until she finally escapes the fog and fever of London for the quiet of Cornwall can Julia discern of face the truth about Frederick, and about herself."--cover

Bid Me to Live

Great War Modernists

Taking 44 Mecklenburgh Square as the focal point and springboard for a critical group study of D.H. Lawrence, H.D. and Richard Aldington, this book offers a fresh perspective on the relationship of modernist biofiction and poetry to the literature of the First World War. A group that Perdita Schaffner described as 'another Bloomsbury set', the Mecklenburgh Square writers, like the Bloomsbury Group proper, 'lived in squares' and 'loved in triangles', in Dorothy Parker's famous formulation. Geographically adjacent, these sets intersected socially and, at points, in their aesthetics: both practiced innovative forms of what may broadly be defined as 'life writing'. But, demarcating the Mecklenburgh Square writers from the Bloomsbury Set, the former had its origins in the transatlantic avant-garde: Lawrence. H.D., Aldington (and John Cournos) were all associated with Imagism, the poetic movement which instantiated Anglo-American modernism. Considered as a pro-tem collective, these four poets, all of whom were also novelists and translators, contest the binaries that still obtain between modernist and First World War writing. This group study of Lawrence, H.D., Aldington and Cournos tracks the transition of Imagism from a pre-war mode to a war poetics which includes but is not confined to the trench lyric and it traces, in the transtextual relations between the Mecklenburgh Square novels, the traumatic imprint of the war on modernist life writing.