Pseudonym, adopted from the name of one of the isles of Scilly, of Annie Winifred Ellerman, the lesbian novelist, essayist, poet, and autobiographer who was the close companion of the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, her lover for more than 40 years) whom she met in 1918.

Through H.D., Bryher met the US writer Robert McAlmon with whom she contracted a marriage of convenience in 1929. The couple moved to Paris where Bryher began a long friendship with Gertrude Stein, moving in avant-garde modernist circles. She wrote a study of the poet Amy Lowell (1918) and founded the film journal Close-up.