As has been pointed out by critics, H.D.'s novels diverge from concurrent works and thought in the portrayal of female homosexuality. Bryher often considered herself a boy, and popular thought held that lesbians were males born with the wrong anatomical parts. But H.D. did not view her attraction for women as a result of mistaken identity or as a self-destructive compulsion.

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Gregg, H.D.'s first female lover, gets written into the texts as a complex character who has both devastating and restorative effects on H.D.'s life. Bryher figures into the narratives as a healing presence who allows for a supportive union of two autonomous and loving partners that H.D. did not feel attainable in a heterosexual world laden with inequalities.

H.D. wrote these novels at a time when she was feeling the constraint of having been labeled an imagist early on in her career and was searching for ways to loosen that stricture. The confessional prose that she penned, though not for the world to see immediately, is a scripting of her life with herself as creator/writer at the center.

And in this process, she inquires into her imaginative and erotic selves, focusing particularly on the healing and generative power of female-oriented sexuality. She celebrates woman as writer and as desiring subject. Susan Stanford Friedman explains that HERmione is "A gynopoetic, a lesbian erotic, [that] displaces the male loop of textual desire."

The central character refuses to be obliterated by a male desire to render her sexual, beautiful, and therefore passive for him and turns to a more spiritually gratifying lesbian love. H.D. writes this novel in highly stylized modernist prose, filled with interior stream-of-consciousness expression and nonlinear narratives.

H.D. recalls in these novels a yearning for a twin as a maternal replacement, a complementary figure to share and enhance her sense of self-worth. Having a partner so close to her own psyche meant walking a fine line between self-aggrandizement and self-annihilation.

This tension gets echoed in poetry from the same period, here figured as matched arms in combat:

It was not chastity that made me wild, but fear
that my weapon, tempered in different heat,
was over-matched by yours, and your hand
skilled to yield death-blows, might break

With the slightest turn--no ill will meant--
my own lesser, yet still somewhat fine-wrought,
fiery-tempered, delicate, over-passionate steel.
("Toward the Piraeus" 115-21)

In her later life and work, H.D.'s intense feelings for women shift toward reverence for a somewhat remote mother or goddess figure necessary as a healing presence. H.D. wrote often of the renewal that an unconventional female energy could bring.

H.D.'s inspiration was frequently derived from her passionate feelings for women, as she maintained strong women-centered paradigms throughout her writing. Directly and indirectly, her work expresses the complexity of homosexual desire and the calming and restorative power she felt in lesbian love.

American lesbian literature prior to Stonewall exploited the "outlaw" status of the lesbian as it moved from encrypted strategies of expression to overt political celebrations of woman-for-woman passion.

Although Western culture's reliance upon binary systems of classification and identification has meant the practical erasure of bisexuality, as such, from literary and cultural analysis, bisexual experiences appear in many literary works from ancient times to the present.

Despite the widespread homophobia in the Modernist movement, several of its practitioners were homosexual; some of them wrote openly about homosexuality, and the groundwork was laid for the gay liberation movement.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

American novelist Djuna Barnes sought new forms of self-representation of lesbians in the face of society's compulsory heterosexuality.

Members of New York's early twentieth-century avant-garde, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler are also the authors of a widely suppressed and largely unread experimental novel of 1930s gay life, The Young and Evil.

Radclyffe Hall, who lived her lesbianism openly and proudly, is best known for The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most important lesbian novel ever written.

American publisher and writer Robert McAlmon made significant contributions to twentieth-century literature, both by publishing avant-garde writers and by depicting a queer subculture in his own works.

Admired through the ages as one of the greatest lyric poets, the ancient Greek writer Sappho is today esteemed by lesbians around the world as the archetypal lesbian and their symbolic mother.