Pilate's Wife

Hilda Doolittle

Jan 2000 · New Directions Paperbook Book 890 · New Directions Publishing

About this ebook

Veronica--Pontius Pilate's wife--is beautiful, brilliant, and weary of a life spent in her boudoir and the Roman court. When one of her lovers sends her disguised as a servant to a seer, she feels suddenly alive, experiencing "sudden pre-visions of inner splendor." The seer, Mnevis, arouses the artist, the dreamer in her, eventually telling her of a Jew, a "love-god," who believes women have an important place in the spiritual hierarchy. What follows is a chain of events in which Veronica commits the one genuine act of her life, offering Jesus a "way out" before his crucifixion.

This revision of biblical history--in the tradition of D. H. Lawrence's The Man Who Died and Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ--is not just a novel; but part of the ongoing dialogue about the feminine and divine. Pilate's Wife was written by H.D. in 1929, revised in 1934, and is now finally published by New Directions, edited with an introduction by H.D. scholar Joan Burke. It is a testament to Alicia Ostriker's claim that, among the women poets and novelists of this century, "H.D. is the most profoundly religious, the most seriously engaged in spiritual quest."

About the author

Hilda Doolittle was born in September 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is a poet and a novelist known as being a member of the poetry group avant-garde Imagists who believed in writing about what they chose. This later lead to her writings on modernism. She moved to London in 1911 where she met Ezra Pound who encouraged her writing. Her poetry was published in the English Review and the Transatlantic Review. Her work often borrowed images from classical Greek literature to evoke a particular feeling in the reader. In 1911 she sailed to Europe and met Richard Aldington - a poet whop would help her in her career and along with Pound the three poets became known as the "three original Imagists". Pound gave her the nickname H.D. Imagiste and it stuck. Some of her poetry collections are Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definition. She also wrote several books such as "Hermione" and "The Gift".