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historiography, layering multiple times and perspectives to demonstrate the fundamental instability and idiosyncrasy of interpretation. First, I will provide a brief account of Bryher's life – given her relative obscurity outside of historical studies of modernism – in which I will pay special attention to her relationship with H.D., the modernist poet and ‘since 1919 [Bryher's] companion, sometime lover, and always friend’, 4 and the French bookseller Adrienne Monnier, to whom the novel is dedicated. H.D. and Monnier represent
-historical relationship to Beowulf that reveals a queerness at the heart of literary modernism, leveraged through a kitschy plaster bulldog named Beowulf in a novel of the same title by Bryher. Bryher's Beowulf does not, Buchanan argues, directly adapt or correspond to the Old English poem of the same name but rather performs a kind of ‘historical palimpsest’, returning us to an analysis of the women in the Old English Beowulf and the gendering of intimacy in the poem and its afterlives. A knot in the bed sheets of literary history and an important contribution to queer studies