A story to delight the most discerning child, The Hedgehog will also charm and impress adult readers. H.D. enthusiasts in particular will find much to think about in this neglected small classic. With its belated reappearance-only three hundred copies were originally printed in England some fifty years ago-comes the joy of a book true to the real shape and feel of things in childhood. The tale concerns a fatherless Anglo-American child, Madge, living with her mother in Switzerland, safe from the approach of WWII but not from growing up. From her first concerns-desires to walk barefoot, to climb the sheerest goat paths up mountainsides, and to learn (without letting on to her ignorance) about mysterious herissons (hedgehogs)-Madge moves to the edge of more adult woes. The great pleasure of The Hedgehog stems from H.D.'s quicksilver creation of a child's world.

A feminist icon as well as a major twentieth-century poet, H. D. (the pen name of Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) wrote several volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and was an exquisite translator of classical Greek drama.