Perdita Schaffner (1919–2001)

Perdita Schaffner was born Frances Perdita Aldington, the daughter of the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle, who used the pen name H.D. Although her mother was married at the time to British writer Richard Aldington, he was not Perdita's father. Around the time of her daughter's birth, H.D. was living alone in a seedy London rooming house, when she was rescued by her young friend Annie Winifred Ellerman, who wrote under the pen name Bryher. Perdita grew up in an unusual household that included H.D, Bryher, and the latter's husbands, starting with Robert McAlmon, a novelist who later chronicled those years in a memoir titled Being Geniuses Together (1938). Bryher's second husband was Kenneth Macpherson, another novelist, who was also in love with H.D. The couple formally adopted H.D.'s child, who took the name Perdita Macpherson, and the four of them lived with an assortment of dogs, cats, and monkeys in a Bauhaus structure overlooking Lake Geneva, which doubled as a studio for Bryher's avant-garde films. They divided their time between Switzerland, London, and Paris, where they were at the center of a group of literary and artistic figures, including Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell. Perdita was educated at home according to Bryher's eccentric educational theories and became fluent in French, German, and Italian. These language skills came in handy for her as a young woman at the start of World War II, when she was assigned to Bletchley Park, the remote English estate where teams of translators helped decode intercepted Nazi messages. She later went to work for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, and her co-workers encouraged her to visit the USA, her mother's native country. In New York City, she took a job as secretary for John V. Schaffner, a literary agent. They married in 1950, and had four children, all of whom grew up to be writers. Following her husband's death in 1983, Mrs. Schaffner moved to the Hamptons on Long Island and developed a wide range of friends and activities there. She published essays in The East Hampton Star, in literary magazines such as Grand Street and American Scholar, and as prefaces or afterwords to editions of her mother's books.