As the title suggests, HERmione is about a young woman divided against herself (Her and Hermione Gart are the same person) and against a certain perception of the world. Although this is the autobiographical narrative of a future poet, the handling of these divisions is unlike anything you will encounter in other portraits of young artists. An intensely personal narrative voice demands that you follow her on her terms and in her language only. The voice confides her universe of desire, drawn with emblems of a troubled, idealized beauty…. The voice is "overwrought" … and the symbolism extravagant, even a little too self-consciously Jungian. Hermione is engaged in a war with precise, sane, emotionally expurgated language, the language of her father, a science professor, and of her brother, a biologist of sorts. Her Gart retreats from the aloof, instrumental world of her father even while convinced that her retreat (her failure in science at Bryn Mawr) brands her a failure in life.

All the basic elements seem to be assembled for yet another dip into the Oedipus complex, as Hermione calls it, for a plunge into that "emotional bog and intellectual lagoon" psychologists attempt to chart. If you dislike this kind of exploration, take heart, H. D. is not about to offer you a familiar version. Science, Hermione confesses, is a perception that has eluded her. H. D. charts her way around the character George Lowndes (Ezra Pound, H. D.'s former fiancé and life-long obsession). Lowndes, a promising poet, mesmerizes Hermione with his eloquence and erudition; she uneasily competes with him for the distinction of having the most original mind. His self-confidence irritates and overwhelms her, his sexual attentions alarm her, and his clowning infuriates—she wonders always whether she is being trifled with. She can't quite make him out. Thirty-one years after completing HERmione, H. D. will still be puzzling him out in An End to Torment where she compares his imaginative influence to "the crater of an extinct volcano." (pp. 378-79)

HERmione is an irritating book with many flaws. Effusive, indulgent, repetitious, rhetorically inflated, it also has a narrative that advances by fits and starts. It is, nonetheless, a very good introduction to the mythologizing impulse behind H. D.'s poetry, to the way in which she seeks out symbolic analogues for personal values. Beyond that, those who have the patience to hear Hermione out will catch the vivid voice of a woman whose alienation profiles patriarchy's most blighting effects. Hermione delivers platitudes at the conclusion of this novel and prepares to travel to Europe. This was, evidently, the note on which Hilda Doolittle left Pennsylvania for Europe. Fortunately, this was not H. D.'s final farewell to Pennsylvania. (p. 380)