A few weeks ago, feeling a bit coldy and a bit January, you know what I mean, I hunted down my copy of Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees and reread it. Should you find yourself in a similar state, I highly recommend it, and you don’t have to take my word for it: Neil Gaiman is quoted on the cover being very enthusiastic (‘The single most beautiful, solid, unearthy, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century ... a little golden miracle of a book’). I don’t think that it qualifies as ‘forgotten’ any longer, being both in print and fairly widely read, but it doesn’t command the same sort of attention as The Lord of the Rings. Nor does Mirrlees’s modernist poem Paris, which anticipated The Waste Land, receive much discussion when compared to Eliot’s work. Yet both Mirrlees’s novel and her poem are very original works. When I’d finished Lud-in-the-Mist I was inspired to find out more about her and also, belatedly, to read Paris, which I’d bought in a volume of collected poems a couple of years ago for my modernist reading project, yes that project which seems to have stalled somewhat. And then I felt moved to post about her, because there aren’t many people who manage to be called ‘the lost modernist’ and write a highly influential fantasy novel and erase themselves from literary history. So today I’m going to write the first of a little series of posts about her and her work.
(Photograph of Hope Mirrlees, uncredited and undated; found here)
‘obscure, indecent, and brilliant’ is how Virginia Woolf described Paris, which her Hogarth Press published in 1920 – it seems that Woolf typeset the poem herself. However, Woolf doesn’t seem to have liked Mirrlees personally, and nor did Katherine Mansfield. They found her ‘pretentious’. Woolf wrote of her:
a very self conscious, wilful, prickly & perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well dressed & pretty, with a view of her own about books & style, an aristocratic & conservative tendency in opinion, & a corresponding taste for the beautiful & elaborate in literature
and deplored at her propensity to change for dinner and match her stockings to the wreaths in her hair. (How I love that.)
Mirrlees knew but wasn’t really part of the Bloomsbury circle. She was born in 1887, to an aristocratic mother and extremely wealthy father, and studied first at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and then read classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, during which she broke off an engagement, very probably to the much older illustrator H.J. Ford. Her father’s money meant that she never had financial worries, while her mother’s upper-class lineage was important to her sense of identity. She was extremely clever and also very beautiful. At Cambridge her studies were supervised by Jane Harrison (who is mentioned as J—H— in ‘A Room of One’s Own’) and she and Mirrlees had an intimate relationship, living together, collaborating on two translations from the Russian and referring to each other as the ‘elder wife’ and ‘younger wife’ (the ‘husband’ was Mirrlees’s teddy bear). Woolf was convinced they were ‘Sapphists’ but whether they were or not is unclear but it seems likely.
In 1913 Mirrlees took up residence in Paris, where she met Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide and Anna de Noailles; she was joined by Harrison in 1922 and they studied Russian together. By 1926 she had published Paris, three novels and, in collaboration with Harrison, two translations from the Russian. But then Harrison fell ill, dying of leukaemia in 1928. And it is as if the light was switched off. No more novels, nothing at all for forty years. Mirrlees converted to Catholicism, lost her looks, moved to South Africa. In her later life she returned to England and died in 1978; she never had another relationship as close as that with Harrison.
(Simon Bussy, Hope Mirrlees, c. 1919, private collection; found here)
Unsurprisingly, her work vanished from sight too. The original print run of Paris was tiny (175 copies), and it was not republished until 1973, when it appeared in the short-lived Virginia Woolf Quarterly. This version was significantly altered by Mirrlees to remove the ‘blasphemous’ passages, and again had a limited circulation. All her novels languished out of print until Lud-in-the-Mist was reissued in the United States in 1970 without Mirrlees’s knowledge, where it slowly built up a coterie of fans including Neil Gaiman. Mirrlees did nothing to promote her books or reputation and withdrew her co-operation from a planned biography of herself which might have increased interest in her work. And of course, she didn’t specialise, which never helps: her first two novels are, apparently, romans à clef, her third a fantasy; her first poem was avant garde, her later works much more conventional; and in 1962 she published the first volume of a biography of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, which has been described as ‘eccentric’ (I’d love to read it) and which she never completed. All in all, Mirrlees seems to have done her very best to have a literary anti-career.
However, her moment is finally arriving. Championed by Julia Briggs, Paris is being reassessed as a ‘lost modernist masterpiece’. Lud-in-the-Mist remains in print and easily obtainable. A volume of collected poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar, has been published by Fyfield Books and Michael Swanwick has written a biography, Hope-in-the-Mist (published by Temporary Culture). There’s even a rumour that the other novels might be republished.
To write this post I’ve relied heavily on Sandeep Parmar’s splendid introduction to the Collected Poems and an article by Michael Swanwick I found at a site called Infinity Plus.
Next: Lud-in-the-Mist.