English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey (review)

tualized persona (), Connor examines H.D.’s interest in the concepts of ritual and community inherent in popular spiritualism, especially in relation to the unpublished typescripts “ e Sword Went Out to Sea” and “Majic Ring.” Spirit transmissions allowed H.D. to reach a wider social community and to contest the dominant ideologies and power hierarchies that are bound up in heterosexual desire and orthodox Christianity (–). Tantalizing the reader with the links between the visual and the spiritual, Connor’s study does not as successfully probe the depths of H.D.’s interest in popular spiritualism, especially in relation to her spiritualist narratives “ e Sword Went Out to Sea” and “White Rose and the Red.” Connor freely acknowledges that H.D.’s challenges to normative formulations of sexuality and gender are undercut by a conservatism that can limit their radical potential: “What is revealed if we look at H.D.’s oeuvre is a spectrum of viewing experiences, containing within it a number of co-existing but confl icting political positions in relation to spectatorship” (). H.D.’s exploration of fi lm and spiritualism undoubtedly highlights the contradictory nature of her relationship to high modernism: although her interest in Hollywood cinema distinguishes her from the “aestheticised purism” () of some of her colleagues, her preference for European avantgarde fi lm (with the preference given to form over content) is entirely in keeping with the at times elitist interests of canonized modernists. H.D. and the Image is a brilliant addition to interdisciplinary analyses of H.D.’s oeuvre, however. In its examination of the interconnections between the visual, the spiritual, and the political, Rachel Connor’s study provides important observations of H.D.’s involvement with Close Up and with popular and avant-garde fi lmmaking in general. Lucidly argued, H.D. and the image would be of use to any reader interested in H.D. and the visual and to most university libraries.