Leo Myers

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Leo (Leopold) Hamilton Myers (1881 – 1944) was a British novelist.

He was born in Cambridge into a cultured family; his father was the writer Frederic William Henry Myers and his mother the photographer Eveleen Tennant. He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. His trilogy/tetralogy The Root and the Flower, set in India at the time of Akbar, is his major work and was recognised by the award of the 1935 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

He was independently wealthy from his mid-20s, travelled and began to write. He married the American Elsie Palmer (1873-1955), a friend of John Singer Sargent who painted her. He made many friends of different kinds (and quarreled with most of them): he was on the edge of the Bloomsbury group, knew L. P. Hartley, Aelfrida Tillyard and Max Plowman, and corresponded with Olaf Stapledon. He did not visit India, and his writings about it have been seen by some critics as reflecting his own intellectual milieu and its concerns.

In the 1930s he wrote in sympathy with Marxist thought, and became increasing pessimistic in his outlook. He committed suicide in 1944.

The designer E. Q. Nicholson was his daughter.

[edit] Works

• Arvat (1908) verse drama
• The Orissers (1922)
• Clio (1925)
• The Root and the Flower
  • The Near and the Far (1929)
  • Prince Jali (1931)
  • Rajah Amar (1935), published as The Root and the Flower
• Strange Glory (1936)
• The Pool Of Vishnu (1940) now sometimes included as part 4 of The Root and the Flower

[edit] References

• Geoffrey Herman Bantock (1956) L.H.Myers: a critical study