This autobiographical novel by the Imagist poet H. D. (1886–1961) is a rare and hallucinatory treasure. In writing HERmione, H. D. returned to a year in her life that was “peculiarly blighted.” She was in her early twenties—“a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place.” She had failed at Bryn Mawr, she felt hemmed in by her family, and she did not yet know what she was going to do with her life.…