Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) has long been regarded as the lost modernist. Her extraordinary long poem Paris (1920), a journey through a day in post First World War Paris, was considered by Virginia Woolf ‘obscure, indecent, and brilliant’. Read today, the poem retains its exhilarating daring. Mirrlees’s experimentalism looks forward to The Waste Land; her writing is integral to the twentieth-century canon.
And yet, after Paris, Mirrlees published no more poetry for almost half a century, and her later poems appear to have little in common with the avant garde spirit of Paris. In this first edition to gather the full span of Mirrlees’s poetry, Sandeep Parmar explores the paradoxes of Mirrlees’s development as a poet and the complexities of her life.
Sandeep Parmar was the first scholar to gain access to the Mirrlees Archive at Newnham College, Cambridge, and her edition includes many previously unpublished poems discovered there in draft form. The text is supported by detailed notes, including a commentary on Paris by Julia Briggs, and a selection of Mirrlees’s essays. The generous introduction provides the most accurate biographical account of Mirrlees’s life available. Mirrlees’s Collected Poems is an indispensible addition to a reading of modernism.
Julia Briggs OBE was Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at De Montfort University. Among her many influential publications were a biography of E. Nesbit and her acclaimed Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. She died in 2007.
Cover Painting Juan Gris (1887-1927), Breakfast, 1915. Oil on canvas. Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris / Peter Willi / The Bridgeman Art Library
Helen Hope Mirrlees was born on 8 April 1887 in Chislehurst, Kent. She grew up in Scotland and was educated at St Leonard’s School in St Andrews. She briefly attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before entering Newnham College, Cambridge in 1910, to study classics. There she met the classics scholar Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) and the two women became companions until Harrison’s death. Hope visited Paris intermittently from 1913 onwards, before taking up residence there with Harrison in 1922. The two women studied Russian at the École des Langues Orientales and translated two works from the Russian: The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself (1924) and The Book of the Bear, a collection of Russian folktales (1926). Hope’s first novel, Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists (1919) was followed by her long poem Paris, published by the Hogarth Press in 1920. Two other novels were published in the 1920s, The Counterplot (1924) and the fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). After Jane Harrison’s death, Hope converted to Catholicism and, in the 1940s, moved to South Africa. She did not publish again until 1962, with A Fly in Amber, a biography of the British antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. Three slim volumes of her poetry appeared during these later years, which culminated in the Amate Press edition of Moods and Tensions (1976), introduced by Raymond Mortimer. In later life, she returned to England and died at the age of ninety-one on 1 August 1978.
Sandeep Parmar received her PhD in English Literature from University College London in 2008 and her MA in Creative Writing from UEA. She has written extensively on the unpublished autobiographies of the modernist poet Mina Loy. She is currently writing the modernist poet Hope Mirrlees’s biography and editing her out-of-print novels at the University of Liverpool, where she is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for New and International Writing. Her Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees appeared in 2011. Her poetry collections include The Marble Orchard and Eidolon, both published by Shearsman. Her monograph Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman appeared from Bloomsbury in 2013. She is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker.
