Hope Mirrlees - Writing

Writing

Mirrlees' 600-line modernist poem, Paris: A Poem, published in 1918 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, was the subject of considerable study by scholar Julia Briggs, and is considered by some literary critics to have had an influence on the work of her friend, T. S. Eliot, and on that of Virginia Woolf.

Mirrlees set her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919), in and around the literary circles of the 17th Century Précieuses, and particularly those salons frequented by Mlle de Scudéry. Mirrlees later used medieval Spanish culture as part of the background of her second novel, The Counterplot (1924).

Lud-in-the-Mist was reprinted in 1970 in mass-market paperback format by Lin Carter, without the author's permission, for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, and then again by Del Rey in 1977. The "unauthorised" nature of the 1970 reprint is explained by the fact that, as Carter indicated in his introduction, he and the publishing company could not even ascertain whether the author was alive or dead, "since our efforts to trace this lady have so far been unsuccessful."

Since 2000, Mirrlees' work has undergone another resurgence in popularity, marked by new editions of her poetry, an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and several scholarly essays by critic Julia Briggs, new introductions to Lud-in-the-Mist by writer Neil Gaiman and scholar Douglas A. Anderson, essays and a brief biography by writer Michael Swanwick, and translations of Lud-in-the-Mist into German and Spanish.

Joanna Russ wrote a short story, The Zanzibar Cat (1971), in homage to Hope Mirrlees and as a critique of Lud-in-the-Mist – and indeed the entire genre of fantasy, describing Fairyland "half in affectionate parody, but the other half very seriously indeed".

Hope-in-the-Mist, a book-length study of Mirrlees and her work by Michael Swanwick, was published by Temporary Culture in 2009.

The Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees will be published by Fyfield Books (Carcanet Press) in 2011 (edited by Sandeep Parmar). It will include previously unpublished poems, the full text of Paris, her later poems and prose essays from the 1920s. Sandeep Parmar is currently writing a biography of Mirrlees as well.