Gate To The Sea

New York: Pantheon, 1958. First edition. Hardcover. Fine/very good. First edition. Hardcover. Light blue paper covered boards over white cloth spine. 119 pp. Illustrated with photographs of Paestum by Islay de Courcy Lyons. Fine, touch of fiant foxing to the spine cloth. In very good dust jacket. A novel set among the greying ruins of the columned temples of Paestum, an other of the author's series touching significant moments in history when mankind has faced the dissolution of an epoch. The daughter of the wealthiest man in England at the turn of the 20th century, Ellerman adopted the pen name "Bryher" when she entered the famed 1902s literary world of Paris whose epicenter was Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co. bookshop. She was a friend of Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hilda Doolittlew and others of that period; openly lesbian in Paris, she entered into a marriage of convenience with Robert McAlmon in order to hide her sexuality from her family in England. They divorced after her father's death in 1927. She used her wealth to suppor many new or struggling authors, artists of the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, the "little magazines" of Montparnasse and beginning around 1930, became interested in filmmaking.