GATE TO THE SEA

Cloth and boards. First edition (preceding the British printing). Photos by Islay de Courcy Lyon of the present day (1958) Paestum. With a gift inscription from novelist Francis Parkinson Keyes to a friend with whom she apparently spent a day in Paestum (Italy). Very good in lightly foxed and frayed dust jacket.

Bryher (1894 - 1983) was the pen name of the English novelist, poet, memoirist, and magazine editor Annie Winifred Ellerman, who supported many artists, writers, and friends from a fortune derived from the Ellerman ship enterprises.  She was a major figure of the international set in Paris in the 1920s, her friends being the usual suspects. With her lover Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and the Scottish writer Kenneth Macpherson, she launched the film magazine Close Up, which introduced Sergei Eisenstein's work to British viewers. From her home in Switzerland, she helped to evacuate Jews from Nazi Germany, and then became a popular historical novelist, as exemplified by this novel that brings to life a ruined city in Italy populated by three ancient Greek temples of the Doric order. "The Gate to the Sea is always the way to freedom." -- quoted from the upper fold-in.