a gallimaufry

Framing Fantasy: Matthew Sangster & Brian Attebery

A couple of days ago I watched this fascinating discussion about fantasy between Dr Matthew Sangster and Professor Brian Attebery, chaired by Dr Dimitra Fimi under the auspices of the Glasgow University Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. (By the looks of it, their YouTube channel has lots of other interesting talks on it.)

I enjoyed it a lot and was particularly taken with the idea of ‘fuzzy sets’ which they talked about as part of the vexed question of how we define fantasy. ‘Fantasy literature’ is a western construct and even within that tradition there are plenty of works which are hard to categorise. Few people would argue with The Lord of the Rings being classified as fantasy, but what about The Master and Margarita, Lolly Willowes, Nights at the Circus or Orlando? (And is it even useful to divide literature like this, unless of course you are a bookshop?)

The idea of fuzzy sets builds on the idea of there not being a binary fantasy/realist divide in fiction, but something of a continuum. You look at relationships and influences of texts upon another – and then you start creating a more interesting picture to explore. An example that they gave was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy: an influence being Dickens’s fiction. Rather than isolating texts, you open them up.

Anyway, if you have time, then do listen… And last year I wrote about Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How it Works for Shiny New Books if you are interested...

 

Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, by Francesca Wade

Glossing over my long absence from the Internet, I am back to enthuse about a book that most of you have already heard of and maybe read. (If you have read it, write your Thoughts in the comment section below this post!) I shall have to write about it from memory, because I do not actually have a copy, I borrowed my mother’s while I was in Britain. Perhaps this is no bad thing, it will curb my propensity to ramble on. (Or will it?)

Quite by chance, Francesca Wade discovered that between the two world wars five women writers lived in Mecklenburgh Square in London: HD, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf. (I hadn’t ever heard of Harrison and Power: Harrison was a brilliant classical scholar who left Cambridge University in her seventies to set up house with Hope Mirrlees and translate and promote Russian literature; Power was a distinguished mediaeval historian who argued the importance of economic and social history, as well as being a Sinophile, prominent socialist and pacifist, and holder of wild parties.) At that time, Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a middle-class woman of modest means could rent a room of her own, alongside artists, radicals and poor families; a little rackety and Bohemian though not too much, certainly quite cheap and in close proximity to the British Library and University College, London.

A group biography of this sort explores the ways in which five women found, and then fought to keep, their rooms of their own. Not all of the women lived in Mecklenburgh Square very long – Woolf hardly at all – so Wade explores her five lives by moving back and forth in time around their sojourns there. She also uses the geographical centre of Mecklenburgh Square to pull together numerous threads of cultural life between the wars. Certain preoccupations absorbed all five. How did talented, curious and clever women navigate a world which denied them equality? Harrison and Power had to work for an institution, Cambridge University, which refused to award degrees to women; Woolf wasn’t even permitted a proper education and had to teach herself. Was it possible to marry – or have a fulfilling relationship – without sacrificing one’s work, if one was a woman? For HD and Sayers, pregnant outside wedlock, this involved particularly painful choices.

Shaping one’s own story was also important. HD wrote and rewrote versions of her autobiography many times over her life, as if trying on different dresses; Woolf skived off labouring away on her biography of Roger Fry to dash out ‘A Sketch of the Past’, scatterings of childhood memories. During the Blitz she watched London’s physical past being bombed to smithereens; eventually her own home and many of her possessions were also obliterated, tangible links with her youth and family gone for ever. Harrison and Power both destroyed their papers (Harrison burnt hers almost gleefully when she left Newnham), with terrible consequences for their posthumous reputations, their radical contributions to history forgotten or reattributed to men.

(Photograph of Mecklenburgh Square, ca 1930; Camden Local Studies and Archives, found here)

Other interests were more particular. Power was a socialist and her story encompasses developments in socialist thought as well as the rise of the League of Nations Union, pacifism and internationalism, all of which shaped post-WWI society. Both Power and Woolf became increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge of their privileges and their reliance on the labour of working-class women. Through Harrison, we learn about the Russian diaspora and its influence on western European culture. Through HD, we learn about the Imagists and the difficulty of living a truly Bohemian life. (Also: that HD was a total slob who never emptied her ashtrays or washed up her wine glasses.)

Square Haunting is a book which has deservedly won a lot of praise. It is a marvellous group biography, full of detail and perceptiveness. It not only brings to life five women and their era; it also reminds us of the importance of taking the time and having the space to think, as imperative now as it was one hundred years ago.

 

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss

(Detail from Fernand Khnopff, I Lock the Door Upon Myself (1891), inspired by a poem by Christina Rossetti; found here)

I’m very fond of Theodora Goss’s short stories, so when I saw that she was publishing a novel I was excited and ordered a copy straight away. Goss’s stories are often formally quite experimental and fantastical; if you like Lud-in-the-Mist or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, her work will appeal to you. This novel in fact grew out of a short story called ‘The Mad Scientist’s Daughter’, which you can read here. While I feel that ‘daughter’ and ‘wife’ have become overused in titles, here that use is appropriate, since it is their fathers and their fathers’ work which form the common bond between the main characters. It also alludes to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which as you will see is also appropriate.

Mary Jekyll has just buried her mother; her father predeceased her some years before and in mysterious circumstances. A provision in her mother’s will leads her to the Society of Mary Magdalen and a young girl named Diana Hyde who claims to be her sister. The fate of their father(s) is intertwined with an investigation into a series of brutal murders of prostitutes in London’s East End, conducted by Sherlock Holmes. For yes, this London of the 1890s is a London in which monsters abound, there’s a nefarious secret society and Mary and Diana are not the only young women with monstrous fathers.

It isn’t actually necessary to have read Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Frankenstein, Rappaccini’s Daughter, The Island of Dr Moreau and Dracula, but I must say that part of the fun of this novel is seeing what Goss has done with the original texts. All of the female monsters have their first appearances, however fleeting, in these Gothic classics. During the course of Goss’s novel they recount their own versions of the stories, which differ significantly from the originals. The differences imply a feminist commentary on the originals, while destabilising them and insisting they are not ‘true’. Questioning the factual ‘truth’ of fiction and claiming it is poor biography is a nice inversion of the accusation sometimes levelled at autobiographies that they are not ‘true’ but ‘made up’ like fiction. There are some good in-jokes too, such as Justine having ‘Miltonic’ English prose.

Goss’s playing with the idea of text and fiction continues in a lovely innovation. One character is the ‘author’ of the novel; she writes the main action and she ‘rewrites’ the other characters’ stories, presumably to their satisfaction because they all chip in with their comments. Here Diana has been telling/writing the story of her origins – Mrs Poole is the housekeeper.

‘To think that you were born in such a place!’ said Mrs. Poole. Suddenly, her heart swelled with pity for the poor orphan child, and she regretted her earlier harshness.

MARY: It’s a good thing Mrs. Poole is sorting laundry, or whatever she’s doing. I don’t want to hear what she would say to that!

DIANA: How do you know her heart didn’t swell with pity? Mrs. Poole can say what she likes, but she always gives me the largest chop and the most pudding.

CATHERINE: That’s because you’re so scrawny.

DIANA: How do you know? Wouldn’t it be rich if our precious Mary wasn’t her favorite after all?

MARY: For goodness’ sake, can you just finish your section?

DIANA: You were the one who interrupted in the first place.

‘Yes,’ said Mary, also feeling a surge of pity for her long-lost sister.

MARY: Oh please!

This questions the ‘truthfulness’ of this account too; after all, Catherine admits that she is using her imagination when writing it all down. It also enacts, on a textual level, the mutual co-operation of the characters who must work together to defeat their common enemy, and the reclamation of their own voices.

By doing this Goss diverges from a tendency of the classics on which she draws to use their monsters and their plots to externalise fear. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for instance, is at a very basic level concerned with our relationship with our ‘dark side’ and our terror of being overwhelmed by it: the characters and plot externalise this. In Goss’s work, the female monsters are a marginalised group who turn their differences to their advantage, whether this be by appearing in a circus or running an apothecary. There is little of the psychological darkness and horror here other than the division of London into two distinct cities: the ‘nice’ London of the West End and the poorer, darker one of the East. Goss instead creates a very detailed and physical world in which the efforts of the main characters are often hampered by practical issues. Such matters as housekeeping, the supply of clean clothes, the lack of pockets in women’s clothes, food, the cost of a cab, the propriety of entering certain places: these all prey on our heroines’ minds. This focus on the mundane makes the monsters and the monstrous more acceptable. Sherlock Holmes mansplaining to Mary Jekyll the story of her own father’s death made me chuckle.

Do I have some quibbles? I do indeed, although this shouldn’t distract from the fact that this is a very enjoyable book to read and clearly written in a spirit of fun. It’s a very plot-driven novel and the pacing is good but the plot itself holds no great surprises or twists. The real strength of the book is its premise – female monsters telling their own stories! – and the literary games it plays. I wished Goss had pushed the commentaries which interrupt her narrative further; they sometimes became a bit repetitive or even redundant and that was a pity. I should also have enjoyed a little more introspection on the part of the characters, especially about their monstrousness, in between the somewhat breathless action. One of the victims of the serial killer is named Molly Keane; I couldn’t help wondering what an innocent Anglo-Irish novelist had ever done to Theodora Goss that she had to meet such a gruesome end. However, it seems there is a sequel in the works – our heroines have been invited to Vienna by one Lucinda Van Helsing, an orang-utan is on the loose and surely heading for Paris – so perhaps some of my quibbles will become superfluous. Certainly Theodora Goss is a writer to watch; if, for me, this didn’t quite match up to her stories, it’s entertaining and bodes well for future novels. (Meanwhile, you can find some of her work online here.)

‘Paris’, by Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlees’ long poem, ‘Paris’, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1920. Virginia Woolf typeset it herself. Sandeep Parmar, in her introduction to the Collected Poems, describes this process as ‘incredibly frustrating’: not only was the poem technically difficult to set, but it was riddled with spelling mistakes (not all of which Woolf corrected) and Mirrlees was constantly revising it, even at proof stage. Woolf must have felt pretty murderous by the time the book was printed. When I worked as an editor, I occasionally dealt with authors who never stopped making changes, and ‘incredibly frustrating’ is a nice way of putting it. I sympathise with Woolf, while also marvelling: imagine having your poem typeset by Virginia Woolf!

Here is the beginning of ‘Paris’ (not really laid out properly, I’m afraid):

I want a holophrase

NORD-SUD

ZIG-ZAG
LION NOIR
CACAO BLOOKER

Black-figured vases on Etruscan tombs

RUE DU BAC (DUBONNET)
SOLFERINO (DUBONNET)
CHAMBRE DES DEPUTES

Brekekekek coax coax we are passing under the Seine

DUBONNET

The Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafening
St John at Patmos

Vous descendez Madame?

QUI SOUVENT SE PESE BIEN SE CONNAIT
QUI BIEN SE CONNAIT BIEN SE PORTE

CONCORDE

I can’t
I must go slowly

When I first read this, I was utterly bemused. What on earth is going on? I recognised a reference to Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs, but really that wasn’t much help in understanding the poem. The Collected Poems includes Julia Briggs’s commentary on the poem and unless you are extremely well-versed in French cultural, social and political history, the French language, the Classics, the geography of Paris and the Bible, you will need it if you’re to understand what is going on in this poem. Without it, the poem veers towards unintelligibility for most of us. In fact, Mirrlees knew very well that her poem wasn’t easy because she included notes to it. She didn’t want to make it easy.  Her notes tell us, for instance:

Nord-Sud, one of the underground posters of Paris. Dubonnet, Zig-zag, Lion Noir, Cacao Blooker are posters. Rue du Bac, etc. are names of stations.

If we look at just the opening lines with Briggs to help us, what is going on? For starters, what’s a holophrase? Briggs writes:

‘holophrase’, a single word standing for a phrase, sentence or complex of ideas, and according to Jane Harrison [Mirrlees’ close friend and Classics scholar] characteristic of an early stage of language development [...] . ‘I want’ can also mean ‘I lack’. ‘Holophrase’ puns on ‘hollow phrase’.

So we begin with a need for words or ideas, an implication of a hollowness which requires filling. Then there’s a list of posters, which suggests that the poet is moving through space, specifically on the Paris métro: she’s going on a journey underground. She passes ‘under the Seine’. This reminds her of ‘Brekekekek coax coax’ (pronounced co-ax), the chant of the frogs who live in the river Acheron, which you must cross on your way to Hades. In The Frogs Dionysos, who is travelling to Hades to bring Euripides back from the dead because all modern tragedians are crap, is annoyed by the croaking of the frogs and asks them to stop, but they retort that the Muses, Pan and Apollo all adore their music and they will carry on, thank you very much. Is the poet also going on a quest under the earth, driven by dissatisfaction with contemporary arts?

Briggs tells us that ‘Vous descendez Madame?’ was what you said while trying to leave a crowded metro carriage if you were polite, and ‘Those who weigh themselves [up] often, know themselves well. Those who know themselves well, stay healthy’ was the motto on station scales. Amid the swirl of thoughts about Ancient Greece and art, these observations anchor us to the present and the concrete. They remind us that the poet is not only a consciousness but also a physical body moving through space. She alights at ‘Concorde’ –  both a reminder of strife (the Place de la Concorde was where the guillotine stood) and one of peace – concorde means ‘agreement’. Later on, after this opening extract, the poem makes direct reference to the date on which it claims to occur: 1st May 1919. At that time, peace negotiations were being held in Paris to settle the First World War, and Mirrlees refers directly to the war and the peace in her poem. This too grounds us in the present moment but situates it in the shadow of the past conflict.

‘Black figured vases on Etruscan tombs’ alludes again to death and the underworld (black-figure being a style of decoration which flourished in Greece in the 7th to 5th centuries). In the poem’s present there are too many new tombs and an overcrowded underworld. The ‘blackness’ of the painted and incised figures is taken up in the posters, for ‘Zig-Zag’ cigarettes were advertised with a picture of the head of an Algerian soldier, ‘Lion Noir’ was black shoe polish and Cacao Blooker is a Dutch make of drinking chocolate. The poem thus starts pulling in ideas of empire and colonialism, of a world beyond France, Paris, the métro.

In Revelation 17: 3–6 the Scarlet Woman is the Whore of Babylon who appears to St John, but she doesn’t shout ‘BYRRH!’ (Ahem, I initially thought this was an Ancient Greek adjuration!) Actually, Byrrh is, like Dubonnet, a fortified wine, and was advertised in Paris in 1919 by a poster of a woman dressed in scarlet, playing a drum and shouting. The woman looks soldierly, lewd, threatening. The poem has been dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but here the voice of sin and death, that of the Whore of Babylon, ‘deafens’ St John. Perhaps modern culture is challenging old culture but it’s complicated: women against men, advertising and commerce against religion and contemplation, noise against silence.

So what do we have so far? A quest provoked by a lack of words or ideas, by inadequate existing art forms. The quest begins with a descent into the underworld and then rises up onto the streets of Paris. We are shown a series of snapshots of a modern city as observed by the flâneur-poet, overlaid by layers and layers of history, infused with ghosts and ancient cultures. But of course, there is much more of it than these opening lines, you’ll have to read it yourself.

‘Paris’ as a whole is a poem packed with contrasts. Constantly referring to the past, it rejects and rejects and creates itself as a radical new form of poetry. It records fleeting impressions yet demands long, thoughtful analysis; it depicts a city open to everyone yet can itself only be deciphered by those with a privileged, educated background. (Or Julia Briggs’s notes!) It throws up into the air death and life, lasting (Greek vases) and ephemeral (metro posters), art and commerce, women and men, body and mind, the particular and the global, and wants them all. It’s the prototype Modernist poem. That’s what I think, anyway. At the moment. What about you?

(Illustrations: The old and the new in Paris: Eugène Atget, Cour, 7 rue de Valence, 1922, found here; Dionysos and members of his thiasos on a black-figure Attic vase in the Louvre, found here; Byrrh poster found here; photograph of the Tuileries taken in 1919 by Claude Moore, from the Presbyterian Archives Research Centre; found here)

Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees

The young ladies who attend Miss Primrose Crabapple’s finishing school have a new teacher:

Their new dancing-master was a tall, red-haired youth, with a white pointed face and very bright eyes. Miss Primrose, who always implied [to her pupils] that it was at great personal inconvenience and from purely philanthropic motives that their teachers gave them their lessons, introduced him as ‘Professor Wisp, who had very kindly consented to teach them dancing,’ and the young man made his new pupils a low bow, and turning to Miss Primrose, he said, ‘I’ve got you a fiddler, ma’am. Oh, a rare fiddler! It’s your needlework that has brought him. He’s a weaver by trade, and he dearly loves pictures in silk. And he can give you some pretty patterns to work from – can’t you Portunus?’ and he clapped his hands twice.

Whereupon, ‘like a bat dropped from the rafters,’ as Prunella, with an inexplicable shudder, whispered to Moonlove, a queer wizened old man with eyes as bright as Professor Wisp’s, all mopping and mowing, with a fiddle and bow under his arm, sprang suddenly out of the shadows.

‘Young ladies!’ cried Professor Wisp, gleefully, ‘this is Master Portunus, fiddler to is Majesty the Emperor of the Moon, jester-in-chief to the Lord of Ghosts and Shadows ... though his jests are apt to be silent ones. And he has come a long long way young ladies, to set your feet a dancing. Ho, ho, hoh!’

Need I add that Professor Wisp’s dancing lessons do not end happily? For characters in Lud-in-the-Mist suffer from the same inability as those in a Dickens novel, the inability to notice that a person’s name reflects his personality. ‘Professor Wisp’, for instance, hardly inspires confidence, does it? I wouldn’t entrust my daughter to him...

(Cover of the US first edition of Lud-in-the-Mist, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1927, found here; the novel has not been well served by its cover designers but this one is pretty)

Lud-in-the-Mist, published in 1926, is, in the author’s own words, ‘A Story of Smuggling, Kidnapping and Adventures on the Borders of Fairyland’. If you like classifying novels, this is a tricky one: a fantasy, a comedy (in the older sense) perhaps, a thriller, an allegory, related in jewel-like prose and a wry tone. The setting is Dorimare, a small but prosperous land in what I took to be a sort of early nineteenth century. Lud-in-the-Mist is Dorimare’s capital, a busy port whose life is dominated by a successful and rather complacent mercantile class which for centuries has rejected ‘the tragic sense of life’ from any art or poetry in favour of pragmatism and common sense. Unfortunately for the good burghers, the western border of Dorimare is shared with Fairyland, a country representative of all they fear and despise. However, while even the word ‘fairy’ is taboo in Dorimare, fairy fruit is regularly smuggled in. The eating of fairy fruit, with its unnatural colours and addictive flavours, is strictly forbidden as it causes outbreaks of ‘madness, suicide, orgiastic dancing, and wild doings under the moon’ as well as philosophising and daydreaming. And yet people do consume the banned fairy fruit, traces of an older and more fanciful Dorimarite culture – when fairies were welcome – persist in oaths, proverbs and ancient art, and not everyone in Dorimare is quite as rational as they might appear to be.

One such man is the Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist, Nathaniel Chanticleer. Outwardly successful and all that Dorimare esteems, secretly he is prey to an unDorimarite terror of the unknown. When his son Ranulph starts behaving oddly, Chanticleer fears that he has eaten some fairy fruit and anxiously summons Dr Endymion Leer. Leer prescribes a restorative holiday for the boy at the Widow Gibberty’s farm (Widow Gibberty! Again, I wouldn’t entrust my child to someone called Widow Gibberty), some distance to the west of Lud. But strange things are afoot – visions, bleeding coffins, absconding young ladies. Defrocked – are mayors defrocked? Sacked? – as he is, after a bewigged clockmaker’s apprentice plants a stash of fairy fruit in his house, Chanticleer must solve an old murder and restore harmony to the nation.

(Photograph of Hope Mirrlees, undated; found here)

This brief outline might suggest that the fairy fruit is a metaphor for hallucinogenic drugs, and Lud-in-the-Mist has been interpreted by some as a pro-narcotics text. I find that metaphor too narrow and, even if you do not, both fairies and fruit are depicted in too complex a manner to act as a wholehearted endorsement for them. The fruit causes madness and suicide as well as dreaming and philosophy and Fairyland is the land of the dead. Instead, Mirrlees includes as an epigraph a quote from Jane Harrison, the classics scholar with whom she had a very close relationship, which suggests we might see fairy fruit as stimulating:

the impulses in life as yet immortalised, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of love or art, or philosophy, magical voices called to a man from his man from his ‘Land of Hearts Desire, and to which if he hearken it may be that he will return no more [...]

Thus, while neither fairies nor Fairyland are idealised, they do represent an important dimension of human experience: the Dionysiac. And Euripides showed us the dire consequences of repressing that side of ourselves (but Lud-in-the-Mist is a happier and less brutal tale than The Bacchae). Officially Dorimare turns its back on all that, but in fact as a culture it hasn’t completely stifled its imaginative side: fairies have infiltrated it, fairy fruit is regularly brought into it, satisfying a craving which some Dorimarites feel, while the similarity of the names Chanticleer and Leer suggests that the two men are not so very different from each other after all.

Lud-in-the-Mist dramatises the healing of a sick society, but healing comes at the price of comfort. It requires an acceptance of the shadow side of life, of the pain and pleasure of love, and of the horror of death. Belatedly, Chanticleer discovers a powerful love for Ranulph, to save whom he will rise to heroic deeds. This self-sacrificing love, sharpened by a fear of loss, is in stark contrast to the affectionate tolerance which most Dorimarites consider to be love (and when their daughters dance away to Fairyland, nobody is bothered enough to rescue them). Mirrlees had, of course, lived through the First World War, a conflict which destroyed so many lives and left no one in Europe untouched. How does a society come to terms with that sort of loss? I cannot help thinking that this grief and fear lurks between the lines of Lud-in-the-Mist.

It is also a funny novel and just a bit bonkers. Ho ho hoh! I love it!

Hope Mirrlees

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.