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London: [Curwen Press for] The Brendin Publishing Company. 1936 [(Colophon:) 1925]. 4to. Original green printed boards, title to upper board within filleted border, in matching green dust-jacket; pp. [vi], 77, [3], woodcut headpieces and title vignettes by George Plank; some dampstaining to spine of boards (resulting in spotting to interior of jacket) and some darkening and spotting to spine and fore-edges of both jacket and boards; some spotting to top-edge of text block and to endpapers and first few ff., mild creasing to upper corner; otherwise internally very good.First edition, one of 300 copies, of American Imagist poet H.D.'s only book for children, published by the Curwen Press for the Brendin Publishing Company, founded by H.D.'s partner, the Modernist novelist Bryher.The work was first conceived in 1924 as a pacifist treatise by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), one of the most prolific women poets of the Modernist era. Richard Aldington, to whom H.D. was married from 1913 to 1938 (although they had separated in the early 1920s) served in the First World War, when H.D. took over his role as assistant editor of the Egoist. In 1916, she went onto publish her first poetry collection, Sea Garden. Her brother was killed in action in 1918. In the same year, she began what would become a forty-year relationship with the iconic novelist Bryher (born Annie Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983), who used her financial status to promote the careers of the likes of William Carlos Williams as well as Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company. In the early 1930s, Bryher and novelist and filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson (then Bryher's husband and co-founder, with Bryher and H.D., of the POOL Group) built Villa Kenwin in La Tour-de-Peliz, Switzerland, where H.D. wrote The Hedgehog. During the Second World War, Bryher used the funds from her inheritance and the safe position of Villa Kenwin to provide crucial passage to the philosopher Walter Benjamin and more than one hundred Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi regime.The Hedgehog details the story of Madge, a fatherless child living with her mother in Switzerland - protected from the reality of the Second World War as it draws near but not safe from the turbulence and volatility of growing up. From her anxieties surrounding the knowledge of mysterious herissons (hedgehogs), her woes soon expand into more adult concerns as she discovers what it means to exist on the precipice of the adult life. In her preface to the 1988 edition of The Hedgehog, H.D.'s daughter, Perdita Macpherson Schaffner, recalls hearing about the book at the age of fourteen: H.D. 'revealed - casually, over the teacups - that she had a manuscript, a story, well not exactly a story, too long, not exactly a novel, too short. A little book for children set in Switzerland, no not really for children, but about a child, about me, well sort of'.
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