Hope Mirrlees

Helen Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) was a British translator, poet and novelist. She is best known for 1926's Lud-in-the-Mist, a novel generally regarded as one of the most influential (though very much obscure) works in fantasy literature.

She was a friend of Virginia Woolf, who described her in her diaries as "a very self conscious, wilful, prickly and perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well dressed and pretty, with a view of her own about books and style, an aristocratic and conservative tendency in opinion and a corresponding taste for the beautiful and elaborate in literature." Her circle of celebrity acquaintances also included T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell. She lived for many years with Jane Harrison.

Bibliography

Fiction

• Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919)
• The Counterplot (1924)
• Lud-in-the-Mist (1926)

Poetry

• Paris: A Poem (1919)
• Moods and Tensions: Seventeen Poems

Non-Fiction

• A Fly in Amber: Being an Exravagant Biography of the Romantic Antiquary Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1962)

Translations by Hope Mirrlees

• The life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself (1924) with Jane Harrison
• The Book of the Bear: Being Twenty-one Tales newly Translated from the Russian (1926) with Jane Harrison, the pictures by Ray Garnett

Translations

• Le choc en retour (1929) translation by Simone Martin-Chauffier ("The Counterplot")
• Flucht ins Feenland (2003) transl. by Hannes Riffel ("Lud-in-the-Mist")
• Entrebrumas (2005) ("Lud-in-the-Mist")

External links

• Genealogical information
• The Lady Who Wrote Lud-in-the-Mist, by Michael Swanwick