Bryher is a pen name. It’s taken from one of the Scilly Isles, where the novelist Annie Ellerman once went on holiday and loved it. She was a shipping heiress, and lived in Switzerland with her husband Kenneth Macpherson and her lover Hilda Doolittle (the writer H D). She was a novelist and a patron of artists in Paris in the 1920s, and died in 1983. What a woman!
Gate to the Sea (1959) is the first novel of hers that I’ve read, and I really liked it, though wished that it could have been a little less flat. It’s not two-dimensional, because the characters are thoroughly alive, but there is an absence of emotion, something unsaid and unexpressed that felt as a lack. It’s probably because the characters are all Greeks enslaved by a rival island race, and have been living under subjugation for many years, unable to speak their own language, and only able to practice their religious rites once a year.
Harmonia is the priestess, the only one in the Temple who survived the Sack of Poiseidonia, which we know as Paestum. She is watched narrowly by the new priest, and spied on by her temple woman, but she is the only one left who can perform the rites of Great Hera, and nobody wants to offend the Goddess.
Harmonia’s brother Archias is intermittently mad, because he once strayed into a sacred cave in a storm and the gods have punished him ever since for his trangression. But in between the bouts of insanity he is fierce and brave, and he escaped the Sack by saving all the last defenders in the last ship to leave. Now he has come back, because the Poiseidonian diaspora need something he left hidden to be able to set up a homeland once more. And he’s come back for his sister as well.
This is a late 1950s historical novel, written after the amazingly strong period dominated by Mary Renault, Naomi Mitchison and Geoffrey Trease. Bryher follows their lead in avoiding dateable dialogue, and ‘tushery’ that distracts from the timelessness of the stories. Gate to the Sea is very good, though not as good as Renault at her peak, and added a new name to my list of authors I want to read all of, to see what else Bryher wrote and how she did it.
Kate Macdonald 
Hi Kate, I’ve been to Bryher in the Scilly Isles a few times and once wrote a blog post about the place, and also about reading “Bryher on Bryher” (which I did). I’d read her memoir, The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoir. Thought you might be interested in the post, so here ’tis:
http://lightbrightandsparkling.blogspot.com/2011/07/england-2011-bryher-on-bryher.html
Cheers, Diana
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Thank you! Lovely photos, very evocative.
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I think you mean Henry Treece, not Geoffrey Trease. Trease wrote children’s books (so did Treece, just to make it more confusing, , but he wrote novels for adults as well).
Another fine historical novelist – then and later – was Peter Vanittart.
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Fine bit of mainsplaining there, Roger. I meant Geoffrey Trease. His historical fiction (yes, for teenagers and older children) shares the undated dialogue, the focus on universal emotional themes and the socialist interest in the individual versus the state, that Mitchison created, and Renault, and, I now think, Bryher developed. My recollection of Henry Treece’s novels is that they were too violent to be enjoyable.
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Ouch!
i remember trying to read one of Treece’s adult novels by mistake when i was a child and being rather disconcerted. I must say, I’d have thought it would be difficult to write about the sack of the city with a fierce brave madman cursed by gods as a character without a little violence creeping in,. Treece didn’t exactly deal with “the socialist interest in the individual versus the state” but he did “focus on universal emotional themes” and made it plain that “It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago”.as well.
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There is no violence in Gate to the Sea, it’s not necessary to the plot. Perhaps you should read it before pronouncing on what the novel ought to be about. Trease was an avowedly socialist novelist: that was the whole point of his novels, writing historical fiction based on socialist principles by focusing on the workers, the people and economic production, not kings and rulers.
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I’m going to be in Paestum at the end of the month, visiting the ruins of the temples, and am thinking of buying and reading this book during my trip!
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Well, it’s very atmospheric, I hope you enjoy it!
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