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In this essay I would like to analyse biographical writing by three female modernist writers: H.D.’s HERmione, Bryher’s A Heart to Artemis, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. How do these biographic novels draw on mythology to constitute the writing woman (of modernism)? At first, I would like to analyse these novels with regard to the question of how they try to articulate a biography of a female writer against the lack of historical models. Here, I would like to add readings of Virginia Woolfs A Room of One’s Own, as a take on the issue of missing cultural history of female writing. Secondly, the implementation of mythology in these texts will be analysed. Here I would like to add readings of H.D.’s Helen in Egypt, as a take on the issue of missing literary and cultural representation of women by women. Lastly, I would like to establish how these female authors are writing themselves in relation to the man-centred artistic world of their time. Here I would like to add reading of Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as a take on the competition of female writers with their male counterparts at their time.

This article focuses on the role of the imaginary of space in the identity quest in the autobiographic novels written by Bryher, a modernist author close to Hilda Doolittle. In Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923), the main character’s sexual dysphoria splits her self in two, a situation which only aesthetic emotion and artistic expression can overcome. I show that the poetic prose descriptions of Cornwall and the Scillies—a wild and peripheral space with a heterotopic function—rely on sapphic intertextuality and implicitly give a subversive tone to the narrative voice. Without openly breaking taboos, heterogeneity, abjection and the blurring of frontiers are dealt with in relation with the motif of the island. It is a metaphoric representation of the sapphic body—the body of the female lover—but also a symbol of the intermediate positioning of the character in her identity, aesthetic, sexual and intellectual quest.