White Rose and the Red by H.D. (writing as Delia Alton) (review)

In White Rose and the Red (written 1947–48), in a move typical of her late work, modernist writer H.D. intervenes in a well-known cultural scene from a feminist perspective. Addressing the mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of visual artists, she rereads a figure central to the PRB nexus, painter Elizabeth Siddall (also spelled ‘Siddal’). Lover and eventually spouse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Siddall was the copper-haired ‘stunner’ of Rossetti’s early paintings, model for John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, and inspiration for Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, the last painted after Siddall’s death from a laudanum overdose in 1862 at age thirty-two. In circling, ruminative prose characteristic of H.D.’s innovative fiction, the novel grants Siddall rich psychic interiority, often detailing from Siddall’s perspective the ‘discovery’ of Siddall, assistant in a milliner’s shop, by painter Walter Deverell; John Ruskin’s admiring patronage of her work; and the fascination Siddall exerted on the PRB. Inspired by Violet Hunt’s 1932 biography of Siddall (to whose approach H.D. objected) and cultural events of the 1940s spotlighting the PRB, H.D. revisited this cultural milieu that compelled her in youth when Ezra Pound, then her fiancé, brought her work by Morris and Rossetti. The title alludes to the War of the Roses as referenced in Richard III; the red rose symbolizes Rossetti; the white, Siddall.

Published for the first time in an ably handled edition by Alison Halsall, this late novel by H.D. joins the wealth of posthumously published fiction by H.D. that since the 1980s has radically enhanced understandings of a writer once known primarily for exemplary imagist poems of early modernism. H.D.’s newly expanded canon includes several autobiographical romans à clef exploring H.D.’s arduous personal and artistic trajectory of the years around the Great War: novels such as HERmione (1981) and Asphodel (1992) illuminate the plight of the Anglo-American woman artist of the war generation. White Rose likewise probes with sensitivity conditions under which women seeking to establish as artists often found themselves sidelined as muses and models, vulnerable and marginal to male ‘geniuses.’ In addressing the challenges of the female artist, H.D.’s work anticipates later work of feminist art historians such as Griselda Pollock. H.D.’s valuably fine-grained fictional treatment suggests how the Brotherhood’s male camaraderie and investment in certain forms of female beauty may have contributed to the ideological confinement, and eventual psychic suffocation, of Siddall. H.D.’s radically introverted Siddall, haunted by her own dreamworld, bears keen affinities with protagonists representing H.D. in her autobiographical novels; and H.D.’s constructions of PRB figures – such as the extravagant, bullying, charismatic Rossetti – resonate with H.D.’s portrayals elsewhere of the ‘héros fatals’ in her life such as Pound and D.H. Lawrence.

White Rose, like three other novels of H.D.’s World War II period published by University of Florida Press since 2009, bears the marks of a period when H.D. intensified her study of spiritualism, reading it as an avenue toward cultural healing. White Rose portrays the Brotherhood as engaged in séances, enthralled by messages from the beyond, and it suggests that Siddall captivated the PRB in part by positioning herself as clairvoyant. Given H.D.’s intricate fictional engagement with such historical material, the edition would have benefited from glosses, but Halsall deliberately eschews them to allow readers to encounter the novel ‘as a novel.’ Halsall’s skilful introduction credits H.D. with importantly resituating Siddall at the ‘epistemological center’ of this narrative and adroitly presents H.D.’s work for new readers. Her commentary might only have recognized somewhat more the weight H.D. accords a lengthy section in the novel on a romance between Siddall and Morris (H.D.’s invention): as Siddall’s imaginative ramblings, sometimes suggesting psychic unravelling, are treated by...