Hope Mirrlees

British · 1887 to 1978

Born Helen Hope Mirrlees on April 8, 1887, in Chislehurst, Kent, into a prosperous Scottish family, she spent a childhood divided between Scotland and South Africa, where her father managed a sugar refinery. She trained briefly at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before going up to Newnham College, Cambridge, to read Greek, and there met the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, first her tutor, then her companion for fifteen years. The two lived together from 1913 until Harrison's death in 1928, dividing their time between England and France, learning Russian together and collaborating on translations. Mirrlees set her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919), among the seventeenth-century Paris salons of Madeleine de Scudery; Virginia Woolf, who became a close friend, confessed she could not get an ounce of joy from it, yet helped find it a publisher. In 1920 the Woolfs' Hogarth Press printed "Paris: A Poem," a six-hundred-line collage of the postwar city that the scholar Julia Briggs would later call modernism's lost masterpiece. A second novel, The Counterplot, followed in 1924. Then came Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), a quiet fantasy of a respectable border town haunted by fairy fruit, the book by which she is now remembered. After Harrison died, Mirrlees converted to Catholicism and largely stopped publishing fiction. Woolf described her as her own heroine, capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed. She lived in South Africa from 1948 to 1963, working on a biography of the antiquary Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, of which only the first volume appeared. When Lin Carter reprinted Lud-in-the-Mist in 1970 he could not establish whether its author still lived. She died on August 1, 1978, at Goring, aged ninety-one.