In her recent book concerning narrative strategies of twentieth-century women authors, Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that these writers have had to “write beyond the ending” of the romance plot inherited from the nineteenth century. “Once upon a time,” says DuPlessis, “the end, the rightful end, of women in novels was social—successful courtship, marriage—or judgmental of her sexual and social failure—death.” While “ending” is thus a term that she uses to mean the outcome of narrative, DuPlessis goes on to explain that she uses it in addition as “a metaphor for conventional narrative” and for the “social, sexual, and ideological affirmations” inherent therein.¹ In broad terms, then, DuPlessis is talking about the reflection in literature of “socially acceptable” patterns of women's experience and also about the need felt by twentieth-century women authors to break those patterns in their own fiction. Even though DuPlessis does not mention them specifically in her discussion, Gertrude Stein's Three Lives and H. D.'s Palimpsest exemplify the major points of her argument. Stein's novel is much better known than H. D.'s, yet both deserve attention for their early departure from the portrayal of “accepted” patterns of women's experience. For, although the two works are as stylistically different as the personalities of their respective authors, both Stein and H. D. use groundbreaking structural innovation to “write beyond the ending” of three traditional female plots. Because Stein alters patterns and H. D. writes new endings, the two works together offer a reflection of women's changing expectations during the tumultuous early part of this century.

It would be difficult to find two authors more unlike each other than Gertrude Stein and Hilda Doolittle.² Stein was forceful, self-assured—an extremely ept self-publicist who presided over her salon at the Rue de Fleurus with a tyrannical hand. H. D., although she was capable of dominating any group when she chose to do so, was given to bouts of shyness and sought throughout her life both protection and reassurance from others. Stein never hesitated to criticize other artists; H. D. was rarely critical even of those who judged her harshly, saying that she could not “afford to make enemies.”³ Stein's emotional liaisons were entirely with other women; no romantic heroine, she related to men on an intellectual basis only, treating a few as equals but most as inferiors. H. D., on the other hand, was subject all her life to what DuPlessis terms “romantic thralldom.” Although involved with numerous women, including her lifelong companion, Winifred Ellerman (“Bryher”), H. D. played a never-ending role as the “ditched” woman—falling in love with a man only to be jilted, and falling in love again. For herself, Stein felt no conflicts as a woman artist. As one critic comments, she operated “out of the myth of individualism,” which permitted her to think of herself as “better than, or different from other women.”⁴ In contrast, H. D. felt keenly the conflicts inherent in her roles as woman and as artist, and she explored these conflicts in her writing. As Margaret Newlin aptly observes, a major theme in H. D.'s work is “how to satisfy the needs of both woman and poet without betraying either.”⁵

A comparison of the two women's writing styles shows equally vivid contrasts. Stein adhered to a deterministic view of human personality and destiny; thus her writing style is prosaic, documentary, that of the dispassionate observer who seeks to define and capture like a butterfly on a pin the consciousness of her subjects. H. D., however, was fascinated by the infinite mysteries and possibilities inherent in the human psyche; accordingly, she is personally involved in the subjective exploration of feminine consciousness that takes place in her writing, and her extremely poetic and impressionistic style—so very different from Stein's—reflects her own engagement in the subject matter of her work. Indeed, the only similarities between the two women appear to be that both were in the vanguard of the modernist movement and that, until recently, critical recognition of both has been grudging at best. Nevertheless, Stein's Three Lives (published in 1909) and H. D.'s Palimpsest (published in 1926) are mirror-images of each other—novels composed of three separate tales about three unrelated female protagonists who typify woman's “accepted” social roles: the married woman, the loose woman, and the spinster. In conventional romance narrative, of course, the married woman would be a “success” and the loose woman and spinster would be “failures.” In Stein's and H. D.'s versions, however, things are different.

Structurally, the two novels together are unique in twentieth-century British and American literature, each novel flouting convention by telling its three women's stories in separate sections that have no narrative continuity whatsoever. In addition, and unlike other contemporaneous composite works such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time, neither Three Lives nor Palimpsest depends for unity upon any device such as a reappearing character or a communal setting. However, each book was clearly intended to be a unified whole. Neither Stein nor H. D. published or attempted to publish any section separately (again unlike Anderson and Hemingway who published individual stories before combining them under one title). Stein's structural innovation was groundbreaking; although Three Lives was admittedly influenced by Gustave Flaubert's Trois Contes, it was far from a copy.⁶ Indeed, other structurally experimental works that followed Three Lives owe much more of a debt to it than Stein's does to Flaubert's. Anderson, for example, openly acknowledged the influence of Stein's book on Winesburg, and although Hemingway would later disavow Stein's influence, there is little doubt that In Our Time benefited from the experimental structure of Three Lives. The influence of Three Lives on Palimpsest, however, is more difficult to pin down. Acquainted, but just barely, Stein and H. D. moved in different expatriate circles in Europe, and although H. D. certainly knew Stein's work in general, nowhere does she acknowledge familiarity with Three Lives.⁷ In addition, H. D. had long been fascinated with the idea of the palimpsest, literally a parchment on which earlier writing is partially visible underneath present writing. As a symbol for recurring patterns of human experience, the palimpsest is an image that occurs frequently throughout her work. Thus the idea for separate stories connected by similarities in pattern may well have occurred independently to her. Whatever the case for or against direct influence may be, however, Stein's and H. D.'s novels are remarkably similar not only because of their structure but also because of the changes that they make in traditionally accepted patterns of women's experience.

Stein's three-part novel describes the lives of Anna (a middle-aged German spinster and housekeeper), Melanctha (a promiscuous young black woman), and Lena (a young German immigrant who consents to an arranged marriage). H. D.'s novel tells the stories of Hipparchia (the Greek concubine of a Roman soldier), Raymonde Ransome (a married poet living in post-World War I London), and Helen Fairwood (an unmarried American historian on a short holiday in Egypt). Seldom failing to label each book a “novel,” critics have noted in both works the unifying repetition of words, phrases, and motifs. Michael J. Hoffman observes that in Three Lives, for instance, the varieties of repetition are many. They include the constant repetition of a single descriptive word (such as brown or sick), which unifies through sheer accumulation, and the repetition of “motif” words and phrases (such as “wide abandoned laughter”), which creates “a continuous quality” throughout the work.⁸ Although the characters in different stories are unrelated, certain character-motifs reappear, providing unity among the three tales. For example, while the word good appears in connection with Anna some eighty-two times in the first story, it is also used repetitively to describe Sam Johnson in the “Melanctha” section and the German cook in “The Gentle Lena” section. In addition, the setting for all the stories is a fictional town called “Bridgepoint” (alias Baltimore, Maryland). Not a communal setting like Anderson's Winesburg, in which characters know or are related to each other, Stein's Bridgepoint—a blue-collar place of red brick rowhouses and railroad yards—simply sets the tone of the novel and provides a unifying aura.

Speaking of a similar kind of unifying repetition in H. D.'s novel, A. Kingsley Weatherhead notes that Palimpsest “is dense with minor details and motifs” that are repeated and form links among the stories.⁹ For instance, H. D.'s three women feel a fascination for a particular jewel that connotes for each of them aspects of the universality of experience. Similarly, Hipparchia is described as “Arachne” who spins a “web” of erotic fascination, an image that is echoed in Raymonde's thoughts of a web-like net that catches “tentacled and tendrilled memories,” and again in the description of Helen as a “spider self” who weaves memories.¹⁰ Such examples are but a few of many. In fact, Weatherhead's summation of Palimpsest as “a tissue of sensations” is much like Hoffman's description of Three Lives as an “accretion of moments,”¹¹ each appraisal referring to the unity achieved through repetition with variation. Thus both Stein and H. D. unify their works by weaving a subtle pattern both within and among the otherwise unrelated stories.

The most important type of unifying repetition in each book, however, has been so far overlooked. Both tell three typically “female” plots (those of the spinster, the married woman, and the “loose” woman), yet both change the traditionally accepted lines of plot development. In Stein's book, the pattern of each woman's life appears to be that of victimization and defeat. Anna, because she is unmarried and must fend for herself, does so in the only way open to a woman of her class and education: she cares for other people, their houses, and their families. After describing a life spent in the service of others, Stein concludes Anna's story by saying tersely that “the good Anna with her strong, strained, worn-out body died.”¹² But there are aspects of Anna's life that bear examination. First of all, nowhere does Anna wish for marriage; she sees enough problems in the lives of those for whom she works to be content with her unmarried lot. Not “mere” domestic help, she in fact has complete authority over household matters in the homes where she is employed. When the time comes that she is unappreciated, she herself chooses to move on. Eventually she opens her own boarding house, and although she wears herself out by cleaning and cooking and caring for her boarders, she freely chooses to do so. Anna is not, then, a reclusive spinster, not the stereotypical old maid who has failed by not catching a man. In addition, Stein alters another aspect of the “spinster” plot. The loves of Anna's life are women. She cares deeply for such employers as Mrs. Drehten, Miss Mary Wadsworth, and Miss Mathilda, and her friend Mrs. Lehntman is described by Stein as “the romance in Anna's life” (p. 30). To be sure, Anna's life is full of toil and worries, and her story ends in an early death. But Stein implies that such would be the case whatever Anna's marital situation, for in the immigrant lower class, hardship is an accepted fact of life.

Section two of Three Lives tells the story of Melanctha, who searches frantically for love and marriage. Strongminded and adventurous at first in her amorous escapades, she is criticized and ostracized by others for her promiscuous sexual behavior, and she suffers rejection by two men, both of whom she has loved and hoped to marry. Her spirit broken, Melanctha becomes passive, develops consumption, and dies. Again, the pattern appears to be that of victimization and defeat. But again, consider the changes made by Stein in the traditional “loose woman” plot. Melanctha is happy when she is free—she is not tortured by conscience, does not picture herself as a slut; she has an honest, healthy attitude. In addition, her first real love and sexual involvement is with a woman named Jane Harden. With Jane, Melanctha learns “what it is that gives many people in the world their wisdom” (p. 106). Eventually she is betrayed by Jane, but her spirit is not broken by that betrayal. In fact, even the loss of her two male suitors, while devastating, is not the coup de grace. Instead, her downfall comes when she is abandoned by a married friend, Rose Johnson. For Rose, says Stein, “had worked in to be the deepest of all Melanctha's emotions” (p. 234). At this point, Melanctha loses her former self-assurance, can feel no sense of joy in life, and dies when she is little more than thirty years old. Surely, then, the pattern etched by Stein is quite different from that of the typical “loose woman” plot, and again the crucial point of the tale is not the failure to catch a man and achieve marriage.

Lena Mainz's life story is the last of the three told by Stein. Unlike Anna, who handles the responsibilities for entire households, Lena is low-echelon domestic help, and unlike Melanctha, Lena cares not at all for marriage. Forced by circumstances, however, she agrees to an arranged marriage with a man whom she does not know, fades quickly during the subsequent years, and dies giving birth to her fourth child. By conventional standards, Lena—who marries and has children—is “successful.” Successful? She acquires a husband who belittles or ignores her and in-laws who make her life miserable. She has little control over her own life before she is married, but none at all afterward. Significantly, Lena's happiest times occur when she is in the company of other women. In Germany she had hated the “rough” and “boisterous” men of her family (p. 246), and both before and after her marriage she cares nothing for her husband. But as a servant in Bridgepoint Lena is fond of the cook and mistress at the house where she works. She likes the other servant girls with whom she babysits in the park, and Stein says more than once that these girls cause a “gentle stir” in Lena. It is “pleasant, all this life for Lena,” says Stein, when Lena is with other servant girls who tease her gently and who like “the simple, gentle, german Lena very well” (p. 240). Thus for Lena, marriage brings nothing like the conventional storybook ending.

In all three stories, then, Stein alters the traditional patterns in two ways: first, in the fact that marriage is not the pivotal point upon which the success or failure of her three women depends, and second, in the fact that each woman finds her only significant happiness through relationships with other women. In Palimpsest, H. D. makes similar changes by writing new endings. Like those of Three Lives, the three life patterns described in Palimpsest are those of the “loose” woman, the married woman, and the spinster. Hipparchia of section one is a courtesan. Captured by Romans as a girl and destined for a life of slavery, she becomes the mistress of Marius, a high-ranking Roman soldier. Eventually discarded by him, she then becomes for a short time the mistress of Verrus, another wealthy Roman. Hipparchia's spirit rebels, however. After a breakdown and illness, she refuses to go back to Verrus and begins again the writing that she had earlier abandoned. At the story's end, she decides to cast her lot with a young woman who offers to subsidize her writing. Obviously, then, H. D. follows the traditional plot pattern, but only up to a point. Described as a cold and sexually unresponsive woman who remains emotionally detached from the men who support her, Hipparchia is yet drawn to men in the sense that she wishes to be considered attractive. She is upset when Marius prefers another woman, and she worries that Verrus will also find her lacking. After all, what else is she to do? In the context of her time, then, her decision to live independently by writing is astonishingly courageous. And, although there is no suggestion of sexual involvement with the young woman who “rescues” her, the implication is that this relationship offers freedom and fulfillment impossible to her with Marius or Verrus.

In the second section (entitled “Murex”), Raymonde Ransome, a poet who writes under the name “Ray Bart,” helps a younger woman named Ermentrude who has been abandoned by her lover. During their afternoon of conversation, Raymonde relives the pain that she had experienced years earlier when she too was rejected by a man—her husband Freddie. This section is the most experimental in style, including page upon page of free-associating during which Raymonde remembers her hurt and humiliation, her consequent inability to write. Finally realizing that she has wrongly let her own growth be stunted by that rejection, however, she transforms her experience into a poem and symbolically frees herself from the “plot” of the past. As the story ends, she decides to spend some time alone in France where she will begin again the writing that she had abandoned. In H. D.'s version of the “married woman” plot, then, Raymonde plays the traditional role, but again only up to a point. Betrayed by her husband for another woman, Raymonde languishes appropriately for years, as any woman who loses a man is expected to do. By using that betrayal as the basis for the act of artistic creation, however, she triumphs over it. Significantly, it is through the mediation of another woman that she achieves this, and it is not until her declaration of independence from the traditional role that the tone of the story changes from one of melancholy to one of exhilaration.

In the third section (entitled “Secret Name”), Helen Fairwood is a professional historian working in Egypt. On a short holiday, she joins a group of tourists who have come to see the pyramids. Highly competent, obviously very learned in her field, Helen nevertheless “plays dumb” while infatuated with a newly retired army officer named Rafton. Throughout the story, however, Helen maintains an ongoing internal dialogue with herself in which it is clear that one part of her thinks little of the game that she is playing. At the end she comes to her senses, admits to herself that Rafton is “just the most ordinary of ex-army captains” (p. 224), returns to her job, and in the process acts as adviser to a younger woman. Thus, although she is middle-aged and unmarried, Helen Fairwood is again not the stereotypical spinster. Because she fails to capture Rafton, she would be a failure, an object of ridicule, if H. D.'s ending followed that of the conventional “spinster” plot. Instead, H. D. portrays Helen's infatuation as weakness and her subsequent disavowal of Rafton as strength, clearly providing a new ending to an old, old story.

Vincent Quinn comments that the solutions to the women's problems, especially Hipparchia's, are a little too “neat,” that H. D.'s “resourcefulness in handling psychological quandaries” is “limited.”¹³ This ignores the significance of the patterns involved: in each case, although H. D.'s women conform to a traditional pattern up to a point, they then take active command of their lives. Further, the focus in Palimpsest is on women who reject dependence on male society and help each other. Hipparchia leaves a life of concubinage with the help of a young woman named Julia; Raymonde Ransome helps Ermentrude, and in the process rediscovers her own identity; Helen Fairwood perseveres in her independent status and is then able to take a younger woman under her wing. And in all three cases, H. D.'s heroines fulfill their personal needs through creative outlets.

Stein's and H. D.'s novels, then, are remarkably similar, both eschewing narrative continuity in favor of a unique and innovative structure, and both electing to rewrite three traditionally accepted plots involving female protagonists. Certainly there are also differences between the two works. As I have said, Stein writes as an observer, H. D. as a participant. Perhaps because of this, the women in Stein's novel represent a social class different from that of the women in H. D.'s. In any age, an unlettered immigrant like Stein's Anna would have fewer opportunities for self-fulfillment than would an educated woman like Helen Fairwood. For similar reasons, Lena Mainz and Raymonde Ransome are worlds apart in terms of life choices and self-awareness. Even H. D.'s Hipparchia, though she lacks citizenship under Greek and Roman law, has avenues open to her because of her beauty and education, avenues that Stein's Melanctha cannot even dream of. Given these differences, however, the similarities between the two works are still striking, and they clearly reflect to some extent the change that was occurring in women's consciousness and expectations in the early part of this century.

There is little disagreement among historians, for example, that World War I (including the pre- and post-war periods from 1910 to 1920) marked a watershed in the history of women's struggle for equality and independence in both Britain and the United States. In her comprehensive historical survey of this struggle, Sheila Rowbotham comments that, coinciding with the fight for suffrage, the war “transformed women's attitudes toward work” and stimulated a “new impatient sexual independence.” Similarly, Susan Gorsky comments that “it took World War I … to open the way to reliance upon and trust in women: from the changes caused by the war, the conditions were set for the emergence of the twentieth century career girl.” Concurring with Gorsky, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note the war's “reversal of the old order” which “contributed enormously to the liberation—and the new exuberance—of women.”¹⁴ The changes made by Stein and H. D. in three traditional “women's plots,” then, are a reflection of the changes going on in society at the time.

It is easy, however, to overestimate the advances made by the women's movement in the early twentieth century and to underestimate the courage required for women writers of that time to defy tradition. The historian William Chafe argues convincingly in Women and Equality that women's “place” and prospects in American culture changed very little until the 1960's.¹⁵ Similarly, Gilbert and Gubar, though they cite the pioneering “herstorical” fictions of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Dora Russell, also point out that these works were created in the face of a declining women's movement and outright anti-feminism. Earl Rovit takes note of the difficulty faced by women writers during that turbulent time, saying that they “were caught ambiguously between the inherited obligations of an older gentility and the rebellious options of a new liberality.”¹⁶ Indeed, in that time of change and resistance to change, pioneering authors faced more than ambiguity in their quest to rewrite feminine experience. Rovit believes that Stein, who resided in “a region of the spirit that is self-enclosed and inimitable,” was for the most part immune to such pressures,¹⁷ but others are not so sure.

Consider in this regard the matters that both Stein and H. D. chose not to discuss openly. The section entitled “Melanctha” in Three Lives and the section entitled “Hipparchia” in Palimpsest are about sexual relationships. Yet in each, sexual euphemisms are employed in abundance. Stein's technique is to use vague, general words. For instance, Stein speaks of Melanctha's “wandering” to mean sexual experiences, “wisdom” to mean orgasm, and “teaching” to mean seduction or the initiation of sex. Although H. D.'s sexual allusions are more poetic than Stein's, they are equally euphemistic: she uses “flowering” to mean sexual responsiveness and orgasm, for instance. When Marius thinks about his sexual encounters with the unresponsive Hipparchia, he says to himself, “You might as well plunge dagger into the cold and unresponsive flesh of some tall flower” (p. 6). In similarly vague but poetic terms, Hipparchia thinks of Verrus' competent lovemaking as “the curious lap-lapping that strove subtly, inreaching, hardly perceptibly moving, that was the languorous yet distinctly measured, equalizing, balancing movement of the inner tideless ocean” (pp. 38–39).

Did Stein and H. D. use sexual euphemisms because they had such fragile sensibilities that they could not bear to speak openly of delicate matters? Hardly. As Richard Bridgman points out, Stein was well aware of the “obloquy, censorship, and prosecution” suffered by writers such as Theodore Dreiser who dared to disregard public opinion. About Stein's use of sexual euphemisms, Bridgman continues: “Although in time she would provide this activity with an aesthetic rationale, it began as a form of evasiveness … [that] permitted the broaching of taboo subjects.”¹⁸ Bridgman's point is clear—since Stein was all too conscious of a reading public that she could not afford to alienate, she was careful not to exceed her sense of what was considered “acceptable.” Similarly, H. D., who was very close to D. H. Lawrence for several years during World War I and after, was keenly aware of the outcry over The Rainbow and other sexually explicit works. If a self-assured iconoclast like Stein was so aware of public opinion as to temper the treatment of sexual subject matter, then surely H. D., who reacted strongly to even slight criticism, was equally prone to being careful. While they were altering patterns and rewriting endings, then, Stein and H. D. were aware that there were certain limits within which they could do so.

In this regard it is also significant that in both Three Lives and Palimpsest the suggestion of lesbianism is veiled. Melanctha's relationship with Jane Harden is sexual, yet it is couched in vague, euphemistic terms and is subordinate to Melanctha's relationships with men. Similarly, although Hipparchia in Palimpsest embarks on a new life with a woman rather than a man, there is no hint that the relationship will be anything other than friendship. This soft-pedaling is especially significant in light of the fact that both Stein and H. D. wrote explicitly lesbian novels: Stein's Things as They Are (first entitled Q.E.D.) was completed in 1903 but not published until 1950, and H. D.'s HERmione was written in 1927 but not published during her lifetime. That both books are highly autobiographical was undoubtedly a factor in the decisions to withhold them from publication.¹⁹ However, the fact that such subject matter would also have caused public outrage cannot be denied. Catharine Stimpson points out that this century's first decades “nurtured external and internal censorship,” especially in the case of lesbian writers,²⁰ and others confirm the “homophobia of the twenties and thirties in the cultural mainstream.”²¹ Thus the altered patterns of Three Lives seem extremely subtle and the new endings of Palimpsest appear less than revolutionary only if one does not consider the social-historical context in which they were produced. Writing as early in the century as they did, Stein and H. D. were walking an artistic tightrope whose precariousness should not be underestimated.

Certainly neither author can be applauded for having been in the forefront of the women's movement, yet in writing what they did, each was making her own contribution. For in addition to the unique position of these two novels in modern literature, their value as historical record and social commentary is evident. And as to influence? Indeed it is evident, as feminist historians confirm, not only that literature “reflects and codifies prevailing ideologies,” but also that it “becomes part of that ideology and exerts influence upon society, on the way people conduct and interpret their lives.”²² Thus Three Lives and Palimpsest take their place with the early works of other women writers, all contributing in their own way to bringing about altered patterns and new endings in the life stories of twentieth-century women.

Notes

1. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 1, 21.

2. Although it was upon Ezra Pound's insistence that she signed her first imagist poems as “H. D.—Imagiste,” Hilda Doolittle herself chose thereafter to write and be known as “H. D.”

3. Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World (New York: Doubleday, 1984), p. 163.

4. Susan Koppelman Cornillon, “The Fiction of Fiction,” in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1972), p. 128.

5. “Unhelpful Hymen!: Marianne Moore and Hilda Doolittle,” Essays in Criticism, 27 (1977), 223.

6. See Michael J. Hoffman, Gertrude Stein (Boston: Twayne, 1976), p. 28.

7. For references to H. D.'s slight acquaintance with Stein, see Guest's biography; Bryher [Winifred Ellerman], The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs (New York: Harcourt, 1962); and Robert McAlmon, McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A Self-Portrait, ed. Robert E. Knoll (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1962). McAlmon (who was Bryher's first husband and one of Stein's publishers) is of the opinion that H. D. and Stein did not care for each other's company. Guest and Bryher agree, with Guest suggesting that the two authors' self-centeredness made friendship impossible. Nevertheless, and even though H. D. never specifically mentions Three Lives, she may have used its structure as a model for Palimpsest. It is equally possible, however, that H. D., who read Flaubert in French, patterned her novel after Trois Contes as Stein did. The question of why no one except Stein and H. D. has written a novel with a noncontinuous, tripartite structure is intriguing but, as far as I can determine, ultimately puzzling.

8. Hoffman, pp. 29–37.

9. “Style in H. D.'s Novels,” Contemporary Literature, 10 (1969), 541.

10. H. D., Palimpsest (1926; rpt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 8, 28, 158, 197. Further references appear parenthetically in the text.

11. Weatherhead, p. 541; Hoffman, p. 36.

12. Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1936), p. 82. Further references appear parenthetically in the text.

13. Hilda Doolittle: (H. D.) (New York: Twayne, 1967), pp. 70–71.

14. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: Rediscovering Women in History from the 17th Century to the Present (New York: Random-Pantheon, 1974), p. 119; Susan Gorsky, “The Gentle Doubters: Images of Women in Englishwomen's Novels, 1840–1920,” in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1972), p. 51; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Modernist Literature,” in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 1235.

15. Chafe's Women and Equality: Changing Patterns in American Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977) traces three historical feminist “movements” in the United States: those beginning in the 1830's, the 1900's, and the 1960's. The first two, says Chafe, stood little chance of effecting broad changes because they underestimated both “prevailing trends in the society” and “the power of traditional forces of socialization” (p. 118).

16. “Our Lady-Poets of the Twenties,” Southern Review, 16 (1980), 72.

17. Rovit, 72.

18. Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 56–57.

19. See Carolyn Burke (“Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship,” Critical Inquiry, 8 [1982], 543–64) for a discussion of lesbian autobiographical elements in Stein's Q.E.D.; and see Susan Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (“‘I Had Two Loves Separate’: The Sexualities of H. D.'s Her,” Montemora, 8 [1981], 7–30) for an analysis of H. D.'s HERmione as lesbian autobiography.

20. “Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 246.

21. The quotation is from Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Susan Stanford Friedman, “‘Woman Is Perfect’: H. D.'s Debate with Freud,” Feminist Studies, 7 (1981), 423. Echoing DuPlessis and Friedman, lesbian/feminist criticism underscores the difficulties faced by writers who felt compelled to encode lesbian subject matter. As examples of strategies for such encoding, Deborah G. Lambert describes the adoption of a “safe” male persona (“The Defeat of a Hero: Autonomy and Sexuality in My Antonia,” American Literature, 53 [1982], 676–90); Marilyn Schuster analyzes deliberate obscurity and the subversion of traditional symbols (“Strategies for Survival: The Subtle Subversion of Jane Rule,” Feminist Studies, 7 [1981], 431–50); and Bonnie Zimmerman cites a heroine's discovery of her authentic self through the identification of innate masculine traits (“Exiting from Patriarchy: The Lesbian Novel of Development,” in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland [Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 1983], pp. 244–57).

22. Lillian S. Robinson and Lise Vogel, “Modernism and History,” in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1972), p. 289.