[The Gift] is a novelistic memoir of H. D.'s childhood. Like her epic trilogy, it issued from H. D.'s creative burst during the period of chaos (1941–1943) following the Battle of Britain: The final chapter of The Gift, in fact, dramatizes Hilda's efforts, between air raids, to write the memoir.

H. D. casts The Gift in a haunting, mystical, yet childlike, voice which matures as the memoir unfolds. She employs the mythical method throughout the work, overlaying fact with religious, literary, and cultural parallels. In the opening chapter, "Dark Room," Hilda charts her Moravian ancestry. She begins with the death by fire of a young girl at the Moravian seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania …, but she focuses on her own inheritance of the mystical, artistic gift from her maternal grandmother. Re-creating the familial context of her youth, she shows how her mother nurtured "the gift," seeking fulfillment of...