[The Gift, a] previously unpublished work, written in 1941 and 1943, re-creates fragments of H. D.'s childhood in Bethlehem and Upper Darby. Each chapter develops a mosaic of incidents … associated in the author's remembrance by the logic of the subconscious. Combining symbols, images, remembered words and phrases, and bits of family history into patterns of highly rhythmic prose, H. D. evokes the impressionism of childhood and the amalgam of memory. The final chapter brings the reader back to the present time and place—London under seige during World War II—and unifies many of the earlier motifs in a tour de force that shows H. D.'s control of her material. A moving and engrossing piece of autobiography.

Alison Tartt, in a review of "The Gift," in Library Journal, Vol. 107, No. 15, September 1, 1982, p. 1660.