Bryher’s Letters to Amy Lowell; or, How to Desire America, Build the Poet, and Promote Transatlantic Literary Relationships

This essay is yet another outcome of the research project “Networking Women”, and a part of an almost completed monograph study of Bryher entitled Bryher: The Quintessential Modernist. Bryher, a British writer and literary patron, and the American poet Amy Lowell corresponded from 1917 until the latter’s untimely death in 1925. In my analysis of their still unpublished correspondence I concentrate on the inception and key moments of their exchange, from Bryher’s first letter to Lowell in 1917, to their meeting in New York in 1920, during Bryher’s first momentous visit to the United States. In the essay I offer yet another example of the interweaving of personal, literary and cultural stories by showing how the two writers’ epistolary relationship evolves into personal friendship and then into reciprocal critical and literary support. Moving from a personal to a cultural perspective, I argue that Bryher’s and Lowell’s letters also tell the story of the hybridization resulting from literary importation, assimilation and re-exportation, in a never-ending cultural circuit.