Doolittle enrolled at Bryn Mawr College in 1905, but withdrew after a year having done poorly not only in math, but also in English. However, she found what she needed outside the classroom in the form of her friends such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Frances Josepha Gregg. She had met Pound and Williams when they had visited her father’s observatory; she was just fifteen. Pound would become her first love, and although it was never fulfilled by marriage, was strained by deceit and estranged for years because of his support of the Italian Fascists, the connection survived, and H.D. was there to offer support and friendship while Pound suffered through his confinement at St. Elizabeth’s.

Hilda Doolittle, declared H.D., Imagist, by Pound when he was fixated on the Imagist poetry movement and found her poems to be the perfect example of such a style, was attracted not only to Pound but also to Frances Gregg, whom she met around 1910. However, this friendship was complicated when it became a threesome between H.D., Pound, and Gregg. H.D. felt betrayed and torn between the worlds of heterosexuality and homosexuality, a theme that would recur often in her life, and one which she would eventually discuss extensively with Freud.

Finding herself in the afore mentioned threesome, H.D. left for Europe in the summer of 1911 with Frances and Mrs. Gregg. When it was time to return to the United States, H.D. convinced her parents to allow her to remain in Paris. (Francis declined to remain with her.) After that Hilda Doolittle only returned to the United States about four times for brief visits. Once relocated in Europe she met many literary figures, among them Richard Aldington, W. B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Dorothy Shakespear. Aldington and H.D. spent 1912 together in Paris; her parents arrived and toured Italy with them, and in October of 1913 Aldington and H.D. were married.

Beginning in 1915 H.D.’s life was shaken by a series of traumatic events. The first of these was the still birth of a child; she believed her response to the sinking of the Lusitania caused it. By then she had met D.H. Lawrence and the two had a growing friendship, which helped H.D.’s state of mind, but caused Aldington to be jealous. In 1916 he enlisted in the army, and became a changed man, mocking their life as poets. Aldington took other lovers and by 1917 was in an extended affair with an American. By mutual agreement between H.D. and Aldington, she left London to have her own affair with Cecil Gray, a music historian. She was to return to Aldington at the war’s end, but she got pregnant and refused to abort the child or to marry Gray. About this same time H.D. and Lawrence ended their friendship because of complicated love jealousies. Then in 1919 H.D.’s brother was killed on the French front; this was subsequently followed by her father's death. H.D., about to deliver her child, caught influenza, and nearly died herself. However, mother and child survived. H.D. divorced Aldington and begin a new life with her friend Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), daughter of a wealthy shipping magnate.

Bryher and H.D. had met in 1918, at Bryher’s request, after she read H.D.’s poetry. A writer herself, Bryher was also fiercely autonomous, having declared her independence from the demands of her family as well of femininity. H.D. and Bryher’s relationship would last a lifetime, each sustaining the other in times of crisis and distress. Together they made a series of trips from 1919 to 1923, the most important trip being to Greece in the spring of 1920. During this trip H. D. experienced strange and surreal revelations (she had a similar, but lesser, experience in Sicily in 1919) that she believed gave her guidance. These "visions" would eventually be incorporated in her poetry.

After Greece, Bryher, who quietly longed to move to America, took H.D. to New York. There they met with Marianne Moore, whom H.D. had known since 1916. The relationship between these three women established an important reservoir of creative and emotional support that endured. When H.D.'s mother joined the two women in 1922, they made a brief visit to the island of Lesbos, where H.D. expressed that she felt empowered in that atmosphere. From Lesbos the women were off to Egypt where they witnessed the opening of King Tut’s tomb. All of these travels foreshadowed the decades of quest that would be H.D.’s life, especially during the years between World War I and World War II. Although she "settled" in Switzerland in 1923, she kept an apartment in London, and make extended trips to Paris. Her journeys of quest lead to her reading an extremely wide range of materials and to experiment in her writing (including fiction) as well as to venture into cinematography. Additionally H.D. became immersed in psychoanalysis and the occult.

1924 saw a major publication event for H.D. with the release of Heliodora & Other Poems. In 1925 this collection along with two others was published as Collected Poems. Her first novel, Palimpsest, was published in 1926, her second, Hedylus, in 1928. From 1927-1931, H.D. wrote for Close-Up, a cinema journal edited by Bryher and another friend, Kenneth MacPherson. The 1931 publication of another poetry volume entitled Red Roses for Bronze, a collection deemed less effective than previous offerings, was a turning point in her public popularity. She published little after this.

H.D. began sessions with Sigmund Freud in March of 1933 that lasted about four months, and then visited Vienna in October of 1934 for another session of five weeks. These encounters account for some of the changes in H.D.’s writing as well as for her writing less. During the 30s she published a children’s story and a translation of Euripides’s Ion. She also wrote Tribute to Freud during World War II (published 1956), as well as a war trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946).

In 1945 H.D. had another breakdown and returned to Switzerland with Bryher to rest. In 1956 she broke her hip resulting in lots of time confined to bed. Her last two works published in her lifetime were Bid Me To Live (1960) and Helen in Egypt (1961). She made her last trip to the United States in 1960 to receive the Award of Merit Medal for Poetry. When she returned home to Switzerland she moved into a nursing home. She wrote some poetry while there that was published posthumously as Hermetic Definition. In June 1961 H.D. suffered a debilitating stroke and died on September 28, 1961. H.D., Imagist was gone, but her persona lives on through her words, continuing to promote intrigue and controversy as they did when she was living.

Sources used:

Friedman, Susan Stanford. "Hilda Doolittle," Dictionary of Literary Biography (1986 ed.), XXXXIV,

115-149.

Zajdel, Melody M. "Hilda Doolittle (H. D.)," Dictionary of Literary Biography (1980ed.), IV, 112-120.