Hope Mirrlees

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Helen Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) was a British translator, poet and novelist. She is best known for 1926's Lud-in-the-Mist, a novel generally regarded as one of the most influential, albeit obscure, works in fantasy literature.

Lud-in-the-Mist was reprinted in 1970 in mass-market paperback format by Lin Carter, without the author's permission, for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, and then again by Del Rey in 1977. Since 2000, Lud-in-the-Mist has undergone another resurgence in popularity, marked by further re-editions, a new introduction by writer Neil Gaiman, essays by writer Michael Swanwick, an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography by critic Julia Briggs, and translations into German and Spanish.

Joanna Russ has written a short story, "The Zanzibar Cat" (1971), in homage to Hope Mirrlees and as a critique of Lud-in-the-Mist - and indeed the entire genre of fantasy, describing Fairyland "half in affectionate parody, but the other half very seriously indeed".

Mirrlees' modernist poem, "Paris: A Poem," the third publication of Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, is highly regarded among those few who have read it, and is considered by some to have had an influence on the work of her friend, T.S. Eliot.

Mirrlees was also a friend of Virginia Woolf, who described her in her diaries as "a very self conscious, wilful, prickly and perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well dressed and pretty, with a view of her own about books and style, an aristocratic and conservative tendency in opinion and a corresponding taste for the beautiful and elaborate in literature." Her circle of celebrity acquaintances also included T. S. Eliot; Gertrude Stein, who mentions Mirrlees in "Everybody's Autobiography"; Bertrand Russell; and Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose literary executor Mirrlees was.

She lived for many years with Jane Harrison, until the elder's death in 1928. Although they divided their time mainly between the United Kingdom and France, often returning to Paris to continue Harrison's medical treatments, their travels also took them to other European countries. Both of them studied Russian, Mirrlees earning a Diploma in Russian from the École des Langues Orientales of Paris, and went on to publish translations from the Russian into English together. Mirrlees and Harrison visited Spain in 1920, and there took Spanish lessons.

Mirrlees set her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919), in and around the literary circles of the 17th Century Précieuses, and particularly those salons frequented by Mlle de Scudéry. Mirrlees later used medieval Spanish culture as part of the background of her second novel, The Counterplot (1924).

She wote little after Harrison's death, taking refuge in Catholicism. The first volume of her biography of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton was published in 1963, and reads as if she had worked on it for the previous thirty years, to its detriment. Two slim volumes of poems were also privately published, with, unfortunately, little to commend them.

Contents

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Fiction

[edit] Poetry

[edit] Non-Fiction

  • "Quelques aspects de l’art d’Alexis Mikhailovich Remizov", in Le Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, January 15-March 15 (1926)
  • "Listening in to the Past", in The Nation & Athenaeum, September 11 (1926)
  • "The Religion of Women", in The Nation & Athenaeum, May 28, (1927)
  • "Gothic Dreams", in The Nation & Athenaeum, March 3 (1928)
  • "Bedside Books", in Life and Letters, December (1928)
  • Biography of Jane Harrison (unpublished draft)
  • A Fly in Amber: Being an Exravagant Biography of the Romantic Antiquary Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1962)

[edit] Translations by Hope Mirrlees

  • The life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself (1924) with Jane Harrison
  • The Book of the Bear: Being Twenty-one Tales newly Translated from the Russian (1926) with Jane Harrison, the pictures by Ray Garnett

[edit] Translations

  • Le choc en retour (1929) translation by Simone Martin-Chauffier ("The Counterplot")
  • Flucht ins Feenland (2003) transl. by Hannes Riffel ("Lud-in-the-Mist")
  • Entrebrumas (2005) ("Lud-in-the-Mist")

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  • The Anatomy of Bibliomania, by Holbrook Jackson, 2001
  • The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison, by Annabel Robinson, Oxford University Press, 2002
  • How To Suppress Women's Writing, Joanna Russ, University of Texas Press, 1983. Citation taken from Chapter 7, 'Isolation'.
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