A Mirror for a Star

Silvia Dobson treats archiving as an act of love. Never intended for an audience beyond the Beinecke reading room, A Mirror for a Star brought Dobson no fame, acclaim, or money. She sold the correspondence and notes to Beinecke in exchange for an H.D. scholarship that, to this day, funds researchers working on women poets. The care Dobson took to make the correspondence legible to future scholars is evident in every page. Painstakingly organized, A Mirror for a Star begins with an eight-page index, the first page of which is shown below, where Dobson describes the date and subject of all 255 letters, each hand-numbered by her. Dobson compiled A Mirror for a Star to ensure that the woman she loved could be found in Yale’s archives; Dobson described herself as a lesbian to ensure that her love would be interpreted on her own terms.

The first page of Dobson’s eight-page index for the letter collection A Mirror for a Star.

Dobson’s statement of intent

On the page to the right, Dobson opens A Mirror for a Star with a statement of intent, describing her project for future H.D. scholars:

“One of the few people left alive who knew [H.D.], I need to celebrate our friendship by sharing five hundred pages of letters, postcards, notes, she sent me between February, 1934 when we first met, and her death in 1961. As our relationship progressed, H.D. gave me advice, affection, ideas, encouragement, as well as reproof deflationary tirades, intolerance. She approached fifty, a difficult age. I, tyro poet, undeveloped nobody, was twenty-two years younger. At that time homosexuals, mostly in the Closet, were ridiculed, ostracized, and if male imprisoned. So I do need to insist that these letters are about Love as celebration, not as fixation. They record a humane, temperate friendship, much more important to me than it was to H.D.”

In the letter below, five lines up from the bottom of the first page, H.D. directly mentions homosexuality, challenging Dobson’s need to self-identify as a lesbian: she writes, “How you love is more important than WHO you love.”

Letter from H.D. to Dobson expressing “How you love is more important than WHO you love.”

Letter H.D. sent to Dobson while she was in England, postmarked September 22, 1956

A Mirror for a Star contains over two hundred original pieces of correspondence and two hundred pages of biographical notes. The letters, varied in content and form, display a twenty-nine-year friendship between two women who shared an obsession with language, consciousness, astrology, and love. Some are handwritten. Some are postcards from H.D.’s travels. Some, sent during H.D.’s time abroad, are pieces of airmail that would have been subject to close government scrutiny. Some, like the valentine below right, contain hints towards the women’s romantic relationship.

Horoscope drawing by Silvia Dobson, given to H.D. in 1935 or 1936

Valentine from H.D. to Silvia Dobson, signed “CAT,” a nickname H.D. used for herself when speaking to close friends, family, and lovers

In 1960, Silvia Dobson moved to California to be with a new lover, an American named Liz Truelson. Still closeted, she told her family and friends that she was going to the USA to focus on her writing. H.D. wrote her last letter, seen below, to Dobson in December 1960, one day after the winter solstice. At the time, H.D. was ill: the letter was transcribed by Bryher, shakily signed by Doolittle’s own hand. She began, writing of Dobson’s move: “How wonderful to feel the turn now in the light.” H.D. concludes the first page with: “I only just realize that you have gone.” H.D. died a few months later, in September 1961. Though moving to America allowed Dobson the chance to live a freer, more open life, she thought of H.D. frequently, safeguarding the letters as talismans of their important relationship.

H.D.’s last letter to Dobson, December 27, 1960

Dobson’s correspondence with Barbara Guest (H.D’s biographer) reveals her struggle to negotiate the ethics of closeting while writing A Mirror for a Star. In the opening lines of this letter from 1983, Dobson writes, “Ever since the H.D. letter saga started for me—with your visit in 1979—I have been conscious of conflict—chiefly about the homosexual question. How should I preserve H.D. + Bryher’s right to privacy without withholding truth + honesty?” Dobson represents a turning point in the discourse surrounding queerness: where H.D.’s generation was wary of labels, Dobson’s generation saw self-identification as empowering, a step that allowed Dobson to write “more honest & clear” accounts of her own life.

Betty Shoemaker (left) and Silvia Dobson in 1987

Since Yale acquired Dobson’s papers due to her connection with H.D, we must look beyond the Beinecke to find accounts of Dobson’s life. Fragments of Dobson’s story are scattered in lesbian publications and community archives around the country. This photo, of Dobson and her last partner Betty Shoemaker, was published in the lesbian periodical Off Our Backs, as part of a feature on “old lesbian living.” Through it, we learn that Dobson spent the last years of her life active in California’s lesbian scene. From 1982 to her death in 1992, Dobson and Shoemaker’s ran their home, called “Star Shadows,” as “an experiment in collective living,” inviting other lesbians to live with them and build community. They also owned a feminist bookstore, Changes, in downtown Santa Barbara.

Betty Shoemaker in front of Changes Bookstore