Book description
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includes many previously unpublished poems discovered there in draft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.
'Paris predates The Waste Land by two years, and... it is, in an
English context, just as experimental and unprecedented. It is also full
of wit, freshness and clever bilingual punning... It is a pleasure to
see Briggs's careful, elegant advocacy of what she calls Mirrlees's
"lost modernist masterpiece" finally bear fruit in this fine
edition.' - Patrick McGuinness, The Guardian, 13 April 2012 'Parmar is a
highly skilled literary investigator.' - John Kinsella, The Australian,
12 December 2011
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. Hope's long poem,
Paris, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1920. 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. She has written extensively on the
unpublished autobiographies of the modernist poet Mina Loy. She is
currently writing Hope Mirrlees's biography and editing her
out-of-print novels at Clare Hall, Cambridge, where she is a Visiting
Fellow. Her poetry collection, The Marble Orchard, will be published
by Shearsman in Spring 2012 and her monograph on Loy's unpublished
autobiographies is forthcoming from Continuum.
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.
