Hope Mirrlees and the Forgotten Female Modernists

Like Mina Loy (whose Stories and Essays I have just reviewed in the TLS), Helen Hope Mirrlees (1887–1978) is a fine example of the “forgotten-female-Modernist” (FFM for short). She spent much of her life in transit, writing poetry but also, in the 1920s, three novels. But, unlike Loy, she was not in flight from an oppressive domestic situation or a destructive love affair. When she wrote her best-known work, the long, psychogeographic poem Paris, shortly after the First World War, she was living in the 6ème arrondissement with the classics scholar Jane Harrison (the original don of Newnham College). (Virginia Woolf described them in a letter to Mary McCarthy as living in a “Sapphic flat somewhere”.)

They had met when Harrison tutored Mirrlees at Newnham a decade earlier, after which they became companions, with Mirrlees nursing Harrison – almost forty years her senior – up to her death in 1928. Indeed, it is mostly through her association with Harrison that Mirrlees has featured in academic discourse so far. With the exception of Michael Swanwick’s biography of Mirrlees, Hope-in-the-Mist (2009), and the late Julia Briggs’s work – notably her essay in Gender in Modernism: New geographies, complex intersections, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott (2007) – Mirrlees has been edited out of the history of Modernism.

Now after Sara Crangle’s edition of Mina Loy, it is with great pleasure that I find, on my desk this morning, the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees. Two FFMs in quick succession – the likes of Loy and Mirrlees are now being remembered it seems. What Sandeep Parmar’s enlightening introduction does well to emphasize, however, is how much of the forgetting was done by Mirrlees herself. She is, in this sense, the FFM par excellence. Paris was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1920 (only the fifth book in their catalogue), and right up to and beyond the printed version, Mirrlees scrawled corrections and comments in the margins, insisting on particular typographical choices, and much to Virginia Woolf’s frustration, changing the order and inserting a number of misspellings (accidentally, we presume). Mirrlees was tireless in her self-editing, it turns out. Fifty-two years on, following her conversion to Catholicism, she revisited Paris to cut out what she regarded as the many “blasphemous” passages. Parmar describes the original poem as unfinished, or unfinishing, compared to the “highly formal, mannered verse” she wrote in the 1960s.

The fact that Mirrlees and Loy have been re-issued after so many years out of print, shows that they might yet play an important role in Modernist studies. It seems from a review of Paris published in 1920, quoted by Parmar, that the TLS missed out on Hope Mirrlees the first time round:

“This little effusion looks at the first blush like an experiment in Dadaism; but there is a method in the madness which peppers the pages with spluttering and incoherent statement displayed with various tricks of type . . . . It is certainly not a ‘Poem’, though we follow the author’s guidance in classing it as such. To print the words ‘there is no lily of the valley’ in a vertical column of single letters might be part of a nursery game. It does not belong to the art of poetry.”

Thank goodness for second chances.

Comments

[Rob Bard]

You neglect to mention that her novel Lud-in-the-Mist has been available for over 10 years as part of Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks series, and championed by the likes of Neil Gaiman. Not entirely forgotten then, although 'female modernist' may be a more attractive designation to academics than 'fantasy author'.

[Thea Lenarduzzi]

Dear Rob Bard, thank you for your comment. You are right to point out that Lud-in-the Mist is available and, indeed, esteemed by many, particularly Fantasy readers. However, her two other novels – Madeleine (1919) and The Counterplot (1924) – are both out of print and have been for years. My intentions in this blog are simply to draw attention to a writer about whose work, in my opinion, much remains to be said – especially when you consider how Paris foreshadows T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Mirrlees is often overlooked in Modernist studies and anthologies and, certainly, many general readers are not aware of her poetic work, so this new edition of her poetry is a welcome addition to the reading list. Not entirely forgotten, no, but surely worth flagging up.

[Clayton Burns]

T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.

[Eliot, T. S. 1922. The Waste Land
www.bartleby.com › Verse › TS Eliot › The Waste Land T. S. Eliot. 1922. The Waste Land. ... Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. Memory and desire, stirring .... Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are ...].

If it were The Wasteland, that would be different. However, I digress.

[Thea Lenarduzzi]

Not a digression at all, Clayton Burns - a fair point and my slip up, duly corrected. I can't even get away with saying it was an intentionally misleading reference....A time-pushed typist...? Dayadhvam.

[Sandeep Parmar]

Thank you, Thea, for this notice about my edition of the Collected Poems. As for her other writing, I am in the process of getting Mirrlees's out-of-print novels republished and I hope that more of her work will be available soon.

Rob Bard is right: we are fortunate to have Lud-in-the-Mist in bookshops: it is truly original. But I would add that Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists and The Counterplot are equally worthy. Whether or not she's remembered as a modernist or a fantasy author, we would all agree, I'm sure, that it is most important that she be read.

[David Auerbach]

I'm happy to read this write-up on Mirrlees, who should definitely be better known.

I didn't know (or had forgotten about) her connection with Jane Harrison, and I've been sent back to her work in the light of Harrison and F.M. Cornford's work on mythology, as well as being reminded of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus.

One other figure I thought of in that time period is Olive Moore. Dalkey has reissued her collected works, I believe, but there is very little information available on her on the web.

[Mike Tortorello]

A year ago I took on the task of reprinting by hand "Paris" duplicating the exact spacing and typographic layout of the original edition. The edition was released a few months ago limited to fifty numbered copies printed on french watercolour paper with a new afterword and gallery of hand inked images. Those wishing to experience the original Hogath edition at a fraction of the price can view the book at abebooks or inquire through me. It's nice to see the awareness growing for Mirrlees work.

Mike Tortorello
Pegana Press