SOURCE: “Altered Patterns and New Endings: Reflections of Change in Stein's Three Lives and H. D.'s Palimpsest,” in Frontiers, Vol. IX, No. 2, 1987, pp. 54–59.

In the following essay, Dunn studies Three Lives and H. D.'s Palimpsest for evidence of their authors breaking through literary gender barriers.

In her recent book concerning narrative strategies of twentieth-century women authors, Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that these writers have had to “write beyond the ending” of the romance plot inherited from the nineteenth century. “Once upon a time,” says DuPlessis, “the end, the rightful end, of women in novels was social—successful courtship, marriage—or judgmental of her sexual and social failure—death.” While “ending” is thus a term that she uses to mean the outcome of narrative, DuPlessis goes on to explain that she uses it in addition as “a metaphor for conventional narrative” and for the “social, sexual, and...