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(Helen) Hope Mirrlees (8 April 1887 – 1 August 1978)[1] was a British poet, novelist, and translator. She is best known for two influential texts: the fantasy novel, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926),[2] and Paris: A Poem (1920), an experimental piece published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press, which critic Julia Briggs deemed "modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition." [add citation for Briggs in Gender in Modernism anthology]
Early Life[edit]
Born in Chislehurst, Kent, to Scottish parents, Mirrlees spent her early years in England, Scotland, and South Africa. Her family moved repeatedly because of her father's career as a sugar merchant. She was taught first by governesses, then attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art briefly before her university studies. [add citation from Orlando article]
Education[edit]
Mirrlees attended Newnham College in Cambridge to study Greek in 1910 and completed her studies in 1913 (still nearly a decade before Cambridge granted degrees to the women who completed its programs).[citation needed] While there, Mirrlees developed the most formative relationship of her life, with her tutor, classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, who was thrity-seven years her senior. [add citation from Orlando article.] It was intellectual and erotic: Harrison became Mirrlees's "mentor, friend, and intimate companion".[3] Francesca Wade argues that Mirrlees "offered [Harrison] a radical alternative to marriage . . . and fresh energy for new collaborations".[4] Mirrlees and Harrison began living together in 1913. The two women forged a private mode of communication in their writing to each other, both appearing as [add quotation from Briggs, "The Wives of Herr Bear."].
Mirrlees expanded her social connections, particularly with fellow writers, via her relationship with Harrison and other Newnham connections. She became a friend of Virginia Woolf, who was critical of her upbringing (imagining that Mirrlees belonged to "a typical English family, devoted, entirely uncultured, owning motor cars" [add citation from Woolf Letters vol. 3]) but published Mirrlees' writing and praised it to her and others. Along with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, her friends included T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, and Ottoline Morrell, who named Mirrlees her literary executor [add citation from Orlando article]. Gertrude Stein, who lived near Mirrlees and Harrison in Paris, wrote about them in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: [add citation from GS book here.]; Her contemporaries also wrote to each other about her intimacy with Harrison, reading it as sexual. Dora Carrington describes them as a "couple" in a 1923 letter to Lytton Strachey; writing about a visit with the women in Paris, Virginia Woolf remarks, "[add 'billing and cooing' quotation and citation here from Letters vol. 3]".
Career[edit]
Continuing to write in Paris, both of them studied Russian, Mirrlees earning a Diploma in Russian from the École des Langues Orientales of Paris, and they collaborated on translations from the Russian. Although they divided their time mainly between Britain and France, often returning to Paris to continue Harrison's medical treatments, their travels also took them to other European countries. Mirrlees and Harrison visited Spain, and there took Spanish lessons. [add citation for this paragraph from Orlando article].
Later Years[edit]
Mirrlees and Harrison lived in London during the last three years of Harrison's life. After Harrison's death in December 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote to her, [add quotation and citation from Woolf Letters vol. 3]. Mirrlees remained in London, moving in with her mother, and converted to Catholicism. She managed Harrison's material in Newnham College, with the intent of publishing her biography but did not complete this project. Her papers toward it are part of the Newnham [EDIT THREE].
During World War II, Mirrlees and her mother relocated to Surrey. In late 1940 T.S. Eliot became one of their paying guests, staying with them on weekends.
In 1948, she moved to South Africa and continued to write until 1963 when she returned to England, settling in Headington, Oxford.[add citation from Orlando article]
Mirrlees died in Thames Bank, Goring, England, in 1978, aged 91. [use existing citation, as is in Wiki article]
- ^ The Peerage, Person Page 55671.
- ^ David Langford and Mike Ashley, "Mirrlees, Hope", in David Pringle (ed.), St. James Guide To Fantasy Writers, St. James Press, 1996, pp. 407–8. ISBN 1-55862-205-5.
- ^ Micir, Melanie (2019). The passion projects : modernist women, intimate archives, unfinished lives. Princeton, New Jersey. p. 16. ISBN 0-691-19427-0. OCLC 1112419891.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Wade, Francesca (2021). Square haunting : five writers in london between the wars. New York, N Y. p. 166. ISBN 0-451-49780-5. OCLC 1232070959.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)