Short Story Month: Rare Find

The next entry in our Short Story Month series hails the rare find written by a celebrated author. A prolific writer between the years 1911-1961,  H.D.—a.k.a. Hilda Doolittle—was primarily known as a poet, but she also wrote a great deal of prose. 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.

For the first time since their original publication in the 1920s, two of those stories have been reprinted with Book*hug as the collection Narthex and Other Stories by H.D. 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.

Read this collection if you champion female writers who challenge traditional modes of thinking, enjoy writing from the mid-twentieth century, or love a rare find.

Narthex and Other Stories by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

“H.D.’s life and work recapitulate the central themes of literary modernism: the emergence from Victorian norms and certainties, the entry into an age characterized by rapid technological change and the violence of two great wars, and the development of literary modes which reflected the disintegration of traditional symbolic systems and the mythmaking quest for new meanings.Love and war, birth and death are the central concerns of her work, in which she reconstituted gender, language, and myth to serve her search for the underlying patterns ordering and uniting consciousness and culture.”

-Poetry Foundation

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.