In addition to submissions to Life and Letters Today, H. D. flourished in long fiction, including an experimental three-part novel entitled Palimpsest (1926), the psycho-biographical comedy Hedylus (1928), The Hedgehog (1936), the Elizabethan-style By Avon River (1949), and Bid Me to Live (1960), which recaps her relationship with D. H. Lawrence and Aldington. Her tenuous mental state, worsened by her ambivalence toward bisexualism, required additional fine-tuning and shock therapy. In token of her treatment by the Viennese psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud in 1933–1934, a collection of personal essays, Tribute to Freud (1954), explored occultism and Freudian analysis.
H. D. was more content in her last years following treatment for nervous exhaustion, and she maintained a satisfying relationship with Bryher. Later, she was paralyzed and aphasic for three months from a paralytic stroke and died on September 27, 1961, at the Klinik Hirslanden in Zurich. To the end, Bryher supervised her care. The poet's ashes repose under a simple, flat gravestone among the Doolittles at Nisky Hill Cemetery in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
H. D.'s influence extends to both sides of the Atlantic. She was the first female poet to earn the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal. The subjects of three posthumous titles — the power of feminine love in Hermetic Definition (1972), her ambivalence toward D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound in End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound by H. D. (1979), and The Gift (1969), a collection of Freudian self-analysis and remembrances of her grandmother — have deepened understanding of H. D.'s place in modern poetry. A more detailed work, Notes on Thought and Vision (1982), is an articulate statement of her aesthetic credo.
