Hirslanden Notebooks: An Annotated Scholarly Edition

In her late work H.D. was concerned with uniting the myths she had created about the different periods in her life. She actively searched for correspondences between people, events, and objects so as to recast them in the final version of her mythos, to find their timeless value. The Hirslanden Notebooks (written 1957-59) were kept during H.D.’s stay at the place of her eventual death, the Hirslanden Klinik, in 1957, and continued while she was staying at the Klinik Brunner at Küsnacht. A collection of dreamwork and reflections, they are to her late work what parts of Majic Ring and Tribute to Freud were to her World War II years: a workbook with which she plumbed her psyche and mapped the images populating it. The important people and events in her life blend with her dream-images; her occult philosophy fuels this quest and is transformed, edited by the information she brings back from dreams and processes in the notebooks. This is the wellspring from which her poetry and fiction are fed.