Hope Mirrlees
Helen Hope Mirrlees (1887 - 1 August 1978) was an English writer who published novels, nonfiction, poetry, and, along with the scholar and feminist Jane Harrison, with whom she lived for several years, translations.
Mirrlees is best known for her third novel, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which was reprinted without her permission in 1970 in mass-market paperback format by Lin Carter for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. It the only one of her works still in print today, thanks to recent reeditions, translations into German and Spanish, and new recognition in the canon of fantasy literature.
However, this resurgence in popularity for Mirrlees's fantasy novel has been marred by an almost equal disregard for her other works, and a mystification of Mirrlees herself ("What a strange creature Hope Mirrlees was!" -- Michael Swanwick), in striking correspondence to the tactics described by Joanna Russ: "By careful selection it is possible to create what I would call the myth of the isolated achievement, that is, the impression that although X appears in this history of literature or that curriculum or that anthology, it is only because of one book or a handful of (usually the same) poems, and therefore X's other work is taken to be non-existent or inferior." (in How to Suppress Women's Writing, p.62)
Joanna Russ wrote a short story, "The Zanzibar Cat" (1971), in homage to Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist, "half in affectionate parody, but the other half very seriously indeed".
Mirrlees's influence has also been noted in the works of Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke.
Bibliography
Novels
Poetry
Nonfiction
- "Quelques aspects de l’art d’Alexis Mikhailovich Remizov", in Le Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, January 15-March 15 (1926)
- "Listening in to the Past", in The Nation & Athenaeum, September 11 (1926)
- "The Religion of Women", in The Nation & Athenaeum, May 28, (1927)
- "Gothic Dreams", in The Nation & Athenaeum, March 3 (1928)
- "Bedside Books", in Life and Letters, December (1928)
- Biography of Jane Harrison (unpublished draft)
- A Fly in Amber: Being an Exravagant Biography of the Romantic Antiquary Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1962)
Translated Works
- 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")
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