Hope Mirrlees
Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) was a notable British author and scholar, recognized for her contributions to early 20th-century fantasy literature. Born into wealth due to her father's industrial success, she was highly educated and became one of the few women to earn an A.B. from Cambridge in 1909. Mirrlees was multilingual, with fluency in several languages including Russian, and she published translations of Russian literary works. Her literary career began with the publication of "Paris: A Poem" in 1919, followed by her debut novel "Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists," which garnered some acclaim but quickly faded from public view.
Mirrlees is perhaps best known for her third novel, "Lud-in-the-Mist" (1926), which has been credited as a pioneering work in fantasy literature. The story explores the intersection of reality and fairyland in a town beset by mystical influences. Despite a withdrawal from public life after the death of her close friend Jane Ellen Harrison, Mirrlees's work saw a resurgence in popularity in the 1970s, especially with the republication of "Lud-in-the-Mist." Although she remained largely unrecognized during her lifetime, her influence continues to resonate among contemporary fantasy writers.
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Hope Mirrlees
Writer
- Born: 1887
- Died: August 1, 1978
Biography
Helen Hope Mirrlees was born in 1887 to Scots industrialist J. B. Mirrlees, who had married the daughter of one of the world’s largest sugar manufacturers. When his own daughter was ten years old, J. B. Mirrlees became the first British investor in the new diesel engine, founding a diesel factory that is still a major force in the industry. Consequently, Hope (as she was called) enjoyed the advantages of wealth, and her father established a trust fund in her name.
Mirrlees received an A.B. from Cambridge at a time (1909) when few women did so. Traveling widely, Mirrlees developed a flair for languages, becoming fluent not only in the languages expected in her circle—French, Italian, and Spanish—but also in Zulu. Her expertise in Russian was particularly profound, and she published several translations of Russian works. Mirrlees befriended a number of the most prominent literary figures of the early twentieth century, particularly T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, and William Butler Yeats. Virginia Woolf disliked what she perceived as aristocratic views in Mirrlees, but that did not stop her and her husband Leonard Woolf from publishing Mirrlees’s first book, Paris: A Poem, in 1919.
In the same year, 1919, Mirrlee produced her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists, which was well reviewed, but soon out of print, and is today virtually unknown. The same is true of her second novel, The Counterplot (1925). Her third, however, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), established her reputation as a pioneer in English-language fantasy literature—not so much in its first publication, which like its predecessors was well received but went out of print—but in its paperback publication in 1970 in the midst of a renaissance of fantasy literature fueled by J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Lud is the story of a town by that name, one of whose rivers flows into fairyland. Fairies begin invading the quiet human town of Lud, a prospect that seems ominous until a leader named Chantacleer arises, embracing fairy as the source of all poetry.
Mirrlee’s closest literary friendship was with classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, with whom she lived for many years and collaborated on translations from the Russian, including The Life of Archpriest Avvakum (1924) and The Book of the Bear: Twenty-Four Stories from the Russian (1926). When Harrison died in 1928, Mirrlees withdrew totally from the world.
Consequently, when Ballantine Books editor and fantasy author Lin Carter rediscovered Lud-in-the-Mist in 1970, his search for her was in vain, and he republished it (quite legally; her rights had lapsed) without knowing she was still alive. When she died in 1978, it is quite likely that she never knew Lud was back in print, more popular in the 1970’s than it had been in the 1920’s. Still, though her influence is strong among modern fantasy writers, even Lud-in-the- Mist is not known as widely as the dozens of contemporary fantasies inspired by it.