This thesis uses three case studies to consider the creative negotiations that Bryher (Annie
Winifred Ellerman (1894-1983)) and POOL (1927-1933), the experimental film group of
which she was a member, deployed in order to represent, and to speak as, dissident sexual
subjectivities in the interwar period. 1 explore their various 'queer articulations’ - the attempts
to both ‘speak out’ and ‘speak back’ - in four literary and cinematic works. 1 introduce the
term ‘veiled disclosure' to consider how Bryher and POOL circumvented both social censure
and artistic censorship by seeking to address a particular readership - those viewers or readers
attuned to difference - while simultaneously concealing their subversive contents from the
audience at large. Queer articulation, however, also refers to Bryher and POOL’S repeated
attempts to forge links, both creative and political, across difference, especially in response to
fascist nationalisms.
The first chapter frames my interdisciplinary project in relation to queer feminist theory, and
argues for the necessity of using a queer theoretical lens for interpreting Bryher and POOL’S
work. In my second chapter, 1 read Bryher’s two early ‘autobiographical fictions,’
Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923) as an attempt to ‘speak out,’ rather than come out.
In so doing, 1 argue that Bryher’s texts were also an effort to forge a queer reading community
not just to remedy her own isolation but that of other ‘queer’ subjects too. My third chapter
explores the impact which cultural censorship had on POOL’S 1930 silent film Borderline,
and, more specifically, how the almost contemporaneous banning of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well
o f Loneliness (1928) informed its production. I read the film as an attempt to ‘speak back’ to
English censors, with Bryher’s performance as the nameless manageress being the fulcrum of
POOL’S retort. In Chapter 4, I focus on Bryher’s little-known novella Manchester (1935-6),
reading it alongside two pieces of film criticism, the writer’s ‘Dope or Stimulus’ (1928) plus
‘The Hollywood Code’ (1931), which reveal her as a prescient critic of mass culture,
especially in relation to the category of kitsch. Alongside functioning as a critique of the
homogeneity of Hollywood productions, I argue that Manchester was also a call to arms,
which encouraged the English population to heed the devastation unfolding in mainland
Europe.