["Bid Me to Live"] evokes the England of the Imagists and of World War I, those times when, as she says, "Jocasta danced with Philoctetes." H. D.'s central character, Julia Ashton, is a poet whose marriage to another poet is disintegrating. Her husband Rafe, home on leave from the Western Front, becomes involved with a girl who lives in a room above the Ashtons' Bloomsbury flat: "I love you, I desire l'autre," Rafe tells Julia, who drifts into a love affair with a musician. But all the while she is magnetized by a writer named Frederick (Rico), who cannot easily be magnetized away from his "great Prussian wife."

Rico is very plainly D. H. Lawrence (Lorenzo), and his physical as well as his spiritual-artistic resemblance to Van Gogh is one of the leitmotifs of this novel, which among other accomplishments adds some interesting bits to the Lawrence...