This conversational piece focuses on Bryher’s post WW2 writings. What influenced her difficult historical fiction? Long time partner of H.D. Bryher kept to the background on purpose. She kept well-covered, low-profile so that she had the freedom  to do what she wanted. Having no sense of entitlement to the wealth she received as she came of age, from her father, she put the money towards her social and literary activism, and funded the modern literary movement coming out of Paris, helping authors with funds so they could write, publishing them, forming literary review, and cultivating a network of subscribers and readers through correspondence and conversation. Her own writings later in life were steeped in surviving 2 world wars and great changes in Europe. She spoke geographically, setting her stories in deep time. This January Tale which she published in America through Helen Wolff, takes issue with the Norman Invasion of 1066, from the Saxon point of view, to point out what she and London had endured during the Blitz and imminent threat of Nazi invasion. She could not abide by England celebrating the 900th anniversary of the Norman Invasion (1066), when they had so recently withstood invasion. Had they forgotten? She felt America was receptive, and certainly so with Kurt and Helen Wolff who published a sweep of her books. In 1966 she corresponds with Helen Wolff over the work on this novel – 1966 -she wanted to get it out, as a rebuttal, as testament to the grim reality of exile, the lot of the refugee.

Hard copies are and will be sent out to archives or the piece is available as a PDF on request to rebbeguin@gmail.