Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career & Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees

by Michael Swanwick, Neil Gaiman (Introduction)

Hope Mirrlees is easily the most mysterious of the great twentieth-century fantasists. She wrote one important work of modern fantasy, Lud-in-the-Mist, and then abruptly fell into silence. Her single professionally published poem was only the fifth work put out by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and is considered by critics to be a significant and possibly even important modernist work. But, despite her long and enduring friendship with T S. Eliot, she never followed it up. She was a fringe member of the twentieth century's single most prestigious literary sorority, the Bloomsbury group, and yet by 1970 she was almost completely forgotten. There are no biographies of her, few pictures, and personal information is dauntingly difficult to find. The mists of time have closed around her. Still, traces remain. With patience, it is possible to gather together these widely-scattered references to Mirrlees, and so assemble a rough sketch of her life and achievements. Let this slim book serve as a beginning. Two hundred thirty copies five copies, lettered A-E, for presentation, twenty-five copies, numbered 1-25, specially bound, signed by the authors and with an original illustration signed by Charles Vess, and two hundred copies in paper covers.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

100 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short book (100 pages, 113 including front matter) is one of those made available to Hugo voters electronically because of its presence on the shortlist for Best Related Work. This prompted me also to read Hope Mirrlees' classic, Lud-In-The-Mist, last month; and for anyone whose mind was boggled by Mirrlees' novel, Swanwick's biography and explanatory material fills in a lot of gaps.

Hope Mirrlees was born in 1887 into a wealthy family, and hung around the fringes of the Bloomsbury group; names like Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot pepper the pages of Swanwick's biography. Her masterpiece came out in 1926 (though she had previously published an epic poem about Paris in 1918), and she lived with the famous classical scholar Jane Harrison from 1913 to 1928. Swanwick concludes that she was, in a sense, cursed by family wealth; had she needed to scape a living after Harrison's death, she might have produced more works of genius, but as it was she could afford to sit back and produce a self-indulgent biography of Sir Robert Cotton, and do nothing much else for the next fifty years. She isn't a sad figure, but we readers are hungry for more.

Reading Lud-In-The-Mist, I did wonder about its influence on Neil Gaiman; he writes a preface here which is absolutely explicit about the importance of the book to his own view of fantasy. It's still not all that well known a book; Swanwick quotes this analogy:

"Elizabeth Hand has compared Mirrlees to the Velvet Underground, of whose first album it has often been said that it sold only a hundred copies but everyone who bought one went on to start a band."

Unlike the Velvet Underground, however, Mirrlees fell silent as a writer after Lud-In-The-Mist (also it was her third novel, coming after two much less impressive efforts). Literary one-shot wonders (one thinks also of Walter M. Miller, Daniel Keyes, and I'm sure you can think of many others) are in a sense more fascinating than those writers who buckle down and churn out a decent output for most of their career; partly because we feel sorry to have missed the unwritten sequels, but I think also because those of us who are not literary giants can still have the sneaking hope that one year we too might produce an unexpected masterpiece out of nowhere.

Swanwick's book includes an 18-page "Lexicon of Lud", explaining the meanings behind the names of the characters, places and species of the town, which helped a lot of things fall into place for me (and which I hope some enterprising future publsher will bind with Lud-In-The-Mist where it belongs). Poor marks, however, for the use of endnotes rather than footnotes. It always annoys me when relevant information is hidden at the end, far from the paragraphs to which it relates. It is even more irritating when reading a PDF version on a screen, particularly since the footnotes themselves are rather interesting; but their relationship to the text is destroyed by presenting them in this way.

[Martine Gjermundsen Ræstad · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that does exactly what it claims to: it gathers the scraps of disjointed information we have about Hope Mirrlees to piece together the story of her life. Coming in from the perspective of that I found this as part of research for an essay on her work Lud-in-the-Mist, it's excellent. Don't know how much of an engaging read it is if you're looking for something to just read for fun.

[Paul Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Henry Wessells] (2016). PDF. 112 Pages. Purchased from Weightless Books.

Thin on content.

The biography itself spans a mere 59 pages.

There are 170 references; annoyingly, rather than being presented intratextually, they’re hived off to an endnotes appendix.

Contains a few (to me) bizarre observations; dry humour, perhaps, for instance:

“The two ladies would doubtless have been horrified to find their sexual orientation a matter of public debate… there is no definite proof one way or another. In the end, whatever one decides is, at base, a sentimental choice.”

“Refusing to enter into correspondence with her [Virginia Woolf] was a career blunder of the first magnitude.”

The ‘Lexicon of Lud’ is very interesting. When I re-read “Lud-in-the-Mist”, which I certainly shall, I’ll be sure to have it to hand.

[Norman Cook · Rating 2 out of 5]

A well researched, scholarly dissertation about author Hope Mirrlees, most noted for her 1926 fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist. Mirrlees traveled in the same literary circles as Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. A book of interest to literary scholars, but probably few else.