Hope Mirrlees

Biography

Hope Mirrlees (1887–1978) was an English poet, novelist, and translator whose work has been rediscovered as a significant contribution to modernist and fantasy literature. Born into a prosperous family, Mirrlees studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she formed a lifelong relationship with the classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. Her long poem “Paris: A Poem” (1920), printed by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, is now recognized as one of the earliest and most innovative modernist poems, predating T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Her novel Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) is considered a masterpiece of fantasy fiction—a subtle, witty, and psychologically rich exploration of a bourgeois community’s encounter with the supernatural. Despite the quality of her work, Mirrlees published little after the 1920s and was largely forgotten until the late twentieth century, when her novel and poetry were championed by Neil Gaiman and other writers who recognized her as a pioneering voice in both modernism and fantasy.