Collected Poems E-Book

Hope Mirrlees

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

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scholar to gain access to the Mirrlees Archive at Newnham College, Cambridge, and her edition includes many previously unpublished poems discovered there in draft form.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.

Leseprobe

Hope Mirrlees

Collected Poems

Edited with an introduction by SANDEEP PARMAR

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A Note on the Text

Select Bibliography

Hope Mirrlees, ca. 1920

PARIS: A POEM (1920)

MOODS AND TENSIONS (1976)

Mothers

The Copper-Beech in St. Giles’ Churchyard

The Death of Cats and Roses

A Skull

Et in Arcadia Ego

The Land of Uz

The Glass Tánagra

The Legend of the Painted Room

‘Une Maison Commode, Propre, et Belle…’

The Rendez-Vous

Bertha frightens Miss Bates

In a Pagan Wood

Sickness and Recovery at the Cape of Good Hope in Spring

Winter Trees

A Portrait of the Second Eve, Painted in Pompeian Red

Amor Fati

Heaven is Not Fairyland

Gulls

A Meditation on Donatello’s Annunciation in the Church of Santa Croce, Florence

A Doggerel Epitaph for My Little Dog, Sally

Jesus Wept

PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS

I’d like to get into your dreams

Crossed in Love

Love Lies Dying

To Mrs Patrick Campbell

To Jean, Who Loves Faerie-tales

The Moon-Flowers

Love

Carpe Diem

My Soul Was a Princess

The Moon-Maid

from My Mother’s Pedigree

The Faerie Changelings

‘Some talk of Alexander and some sing Monty’s praise’

A Friendship

The Shooting Stars

Ostia Antica

The Toad

The Invocation, by Anna de Noailles

Dusk, by Albert Samain

ESSAYS

Some Aspects of the Art of Alexey Mikhailovich Remizov (1926)

Listening in to the Past (1926)

An Earthly Paradise (1927)

The Religion of Women (1927)

Gothic Dreams (1928)

Bedside Books (1928)

NOTES AND APPENDIX

Abbreviations

Commentary on Paris, by Julia Briggs

Notes on the Poems and Essays

Appendix: ‘To Her. A twilight poem’, by Jane Ellen Harrison

Index of Titles and First Lines

About the Author

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the assistance and support of the Principal and Fellows of Newnham College, Cambridge, for allowing me unrestricted access to the papers of Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison. The College’s archivists, Anne Thomson and Patricia Ackerman, provided expert guidance in navigating Newnham’s collections; their insights helped to shape this edition.

This edition benefits greatly from the assistance of research library staff in locating and reproducing Mirrlees-related materials: W.S. Hoole Library at the University of Alabama; the Amherst Center for Russian Culture; Special Collections, University of Glasgow; The Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin; The Lilly Library, University of Indiana; the knowledgeable Mihaela Bacou and Brunhilde Biebuyck at Reid Hall (Paris); Anne Manuel at Somerville College Archives, Oxford; Special Collections, University of Cape Town Libraries; and the Victoria University Library.

For their permission, I am indebted to Hope Mirrlees’s literary executors John Saunders and Margaret Ellis. Their collective wisdom and enthusiasm for this project were invaluable. I am very grateful to Judith Willson at Carcanet, who provided constant support and encouragement during every stage of this edition.

Many friends and colleagues helped at various stages of the process: Robert Ackerman, Jon Briggs, Alfred Corn, Lesley Fiedler, Rebecca Harbor, Laurence McGilvery, Sura Qadiri, Stanley Rabinowitz, Claire Saunders, Marilyn Smith and Henry Wessells. Thanks are also due to the Mirrleesian Michael Swanwick for his generosity and keen knowledge of Hope’s life and work. For time, space and intellectual camaraderie, thanks must be given to Ann Pellegrini and Robert Campbell at New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

I would like to express my gratitude to James Byrne – who began work on this book in the role of co-editor – for having the grace to step aside once the project hit full swing and my vision of it began to take over. This edition benefits greatly from his insight and wisdom. And finally, I am grateful to my wonderful family.

§

This edition is dedicated to the memory of Julia Briggs, whose pioneering work on Paris lit the torch for all future Mirrlees scholars.

Introduction

And then there is another thought. We are told now that we bear within us the seeds, not of one, but of two lives – the life of the race and the life of the individual. The life of the race makes for racial immortality; the life of the individual suffers l’attirance de la mort, the lure of death; and this from the outset. The unicellular animals are practically immortal; the complexity of the individual spells death. The unmarried and childless cut themselves loose from racial immortality, and are dedicated to individual life – a side track, a blind alley, yet surely a supreme end in itself.

Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (1925)

One might expect an introduction to the poetry of Hope Mirrlees to begin with the woman herself, to offer a catalogue of biographical facts, some historical gossip, anecdotes: a fine broderie of names, dates, and places. But in the case of Hope Mirrlees, what is known about her life offers few clues about the composition of her lately rediscovered modernist ‘lost masterpiece’, the long poem Paris.1 She rarely made reference to it in her correspondence and, soon after the Hogarth Press published Paris in 1920, it quickly disappeared, nearly taking with it its increasingly reclusive author. And when, reluctantly, Mirrlees returned to Paris fifty-two years later and excised ‘blasphemous’ passages before republication, the literary journal in which it appeared folded after just three issues. Rather unsettlingly, especially for scholars of modernism, Mirrlees’s brilliant poem seemed like a one-off. Decades after Mirrlees’s death in 1978, her poem began to re-emerge from the archives of modernist literature and has been hailed by some as an exemplary text of British modernist writing. This edition celebrates the dynamism of Mirrlees’s long poem, whilst placing it within the context of her wider oeuvre, her life, and her networks of influence.

So how do we connect the woman to the work that she neglected and eventually distanced herself from? How do we explain the dramatic change in her poetics from 1920 to 1960, by which time Mirrlees had plunged into highly formal, mannered verse? How, indeed, can we reconcile the style of Paris with that of her later poems? This shift, seen by many as the demise of Mirrlees’s literary career – she published three novels in addition to Paris in the 1920s and then didn’t publish again for over thirty years – was linked, quite plausibly, to the death of her companion, the classics scholar Jane Harrison, in 1928. Harrison (born in 1850, and Mirrlees’s elder by nearly forty years) was her tutor at Newnham College from 1910 to 1913. The two women bonded during those years and, by 1914, what Mirrlees described as a ‘close friendship’ with Harrison had evolved – they lived together from 1922 until the end of Jane’s life. We know far more about Jane Harrison than we do about Mirrlees. Harrison was, by some accounts, the first professional female academic in Britain – in 1898 she became the first woman to give university lectures at Cambridge – and her theories on the function of ritual in ancient societies were highly influential to early twentieth-century anthropology. There have been numerous studies of her work and her involvement with the Cambridge Ritualists, and several biographies of Harrison to date. But perhaps the best-known glimpse we have of Jane Harrison is in Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, delivered as two lectures at Newnham and Girton colleges the year Harrison died.

[…] and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress – could it be the famous scholar, could it be J— H— herself? All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword – the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring. For youth –2

Here Woolf is walking through the gardens of Fernham (a fictitious hybrid of Newnham and Girton) when she imagines herself back in the spring (it is actually October) and she spots Harrison’s ghostly figure. The spring gives way to the ‘terrible reality’ of death, perhaps partly a reference to Jane’s death in early April that year. Her vision of Jane, who was Woolf’s friend and whose scholarship she clearly admired, appears not so coincidentally in Woolf’s treatise on the lives of women writers. Famously the question of what women sacrifice, in the pursuit of intellectual life, runs throughout her essay. As Harrison wrote in her memoir:

By what miracle I escaped marriage I do not know, for all my life long I fell in love. But, on the whole, I am glad. I do not doubt that I lost much, but I am quite sure I gained more. Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers two things that made life to me glorious – friendship and learning. In man it was always the friend, not the husband, that I wanted. Family life has never attracted me. At its best it seems to me rather narrow and selfish; at its worst, a private hell. The role of wife and mother is no easy one; with my head full of other things I might have dismally failed. On the other hand, I have a natural gift for community life. It seems to me sane and civilised and economically right. I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a great, silent garden around me.’3

Women must, as readers and authors, preserve the community; they must choose friendship and learning over the more mundane options of marriage and family; they must be prepared to see the ghosts of their literary mothers coming out for air on an imaginary spring evening. And this is where we turn again to Hope. When Jane died, Mirrlees’s life changed irrevocably. After Harrison’s funeral, Hope spent a few weeks in France to recover from the strain of nursing Jane during her final months. She dreaded returning to England to face her and Jane’s mutual friends.4 She held onto one line from a letter of condolence as the most consoling of all, one she would paraphrase many years later to T.S. Eliot’s widow, her dear friend Valerie: ‘Anyhow, what a comfort for you to have been all you were to her.’5 It was from Virginia Woolf.

§

Helen Hope Mirrlees was born on 8 April 1887 in Chislehurst, Kent and died in 1978, at the age of ninety-one. She was educated at St Leonard’s School in St Andrews and, later, after a year-long stint studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, took up classics at Newnham from 1910 to 1913 (she did not sit the Tripos examinations). Mirrlees’s mother, Emily Lina Mirrlees, was descended from Scottish aristocracy, the Moncrieffs, and her father, William Julius Mirrlees, was an engineer in Glasgow. W.J. Mirrlees cofounded the Mirrlees-Tongaat (now Tongaat-Hulett) Company based in Natal, a lucrative South African sugar manufacturer. As an heiress to the Mirrlees-Tongaat fortunes, Hope spent much of her life in relative comfort as an exile from Britain, living in South Africa and France and making extended stays in southern Europe. The Mirrlees family – which also included Hope’s two younger siblings, William Henry Buchanan (Reay) and Margaret Rosalys (Margot) – was, it would seem, close, convivial and eccentric. Pet names pepper their correspondence to each other: ‘Sneezor’; ‘Bolo’; ‘Snowdrop’; ‘Skip’; ‘Mappie’; ‘Nursey’; ‘Hubbie’; ‘Wifey’; ‘Silly Sealie’; ‘Seal-Child Mirrlees’ and more. The letters from Hope to her mother Lina (referred to as either ‘Mappie’ or ‘The Seal’ by her children) keep track of the intimate details of Hope’s daily life whilst she was away intermittently in France between 1913 and 1926.6 Hope often consulted her parents about housing and travel, in part because she relied on their continuous financial support. But one also senses that Hope’s connection with her mother was, until Lina’s death in 1948, a crucial and substantial anchor to her own identity as a Moncrieff and as a member of an aristocratic set. This is not the least because Lina herself figures in the lives and memoirs of some of Hope’s most auspicious associations, including T.S. Eliot, the poet and critic Fredegond Shove, the Strachey family and, of course, Jane Harrison. In the Hope Mirrlees archive, a long, unpublished typescript, entitled ‘A Discursive and Selective Pedigree of Emily Lina Mirrlees, Née Moncrieff, By Her Daughter, Hope Mirrlees’, attempts to trace the Moncrieff lineage through her maternal ancestry.7 It is an intricate web extending back several centuries through baronets and Scottish royalty (including both the Lyons and the Lindsays). In it Hope claimed that Lina had ‘inherited her mother’s beauty, her father’s charm, and the high courage of her ancestors’. Lina was evidently very fond of poetry, and counted Wordsworth as her favourite, followed closely by Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (whose poems she could recite from memory). The Mirrlees family’s closeness – and Hope’s financial dependence – meant that she frequently returned to stay at the family home between 1913 and 1948; first at Cranmer Road in Cambridge and Mount Blow near Great Shelford and then later at Shamley Wood, or ‘The Shambles’, near Guildford, Surrey. Hope’s recollections conjure images of witty ‘table talk’, extravagance and good-natured teasing by all – the warmth of the Mirrlees family was not lost on its most famous boarder, Tom Eliot. Eliot, who lived with the Mirrleeses during World War II, wrote to Hope in 1951 that Shamley was the nearest thing to home he had had since his childhood and ‘it may be that I did there what will be regarded as my best work’, a reference to his Four Quartets. About his devotion to Hope’s mother, he wrote: ‘I think of Mappie for a moment every day – as you say, in eternity’.8 Eliot had been, for a time, part of the family circle.

Hope Mirrlees figures in the biographies of her contemporaries as a stunningly beautiful woman, a fierce intellectual and a peripheral Bloomsbury figure. In the 1920s she appears in the correspondence and memoirs of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and Mary MacCarthy, and she was chosen as one of the literary executors for the Bloomsbury hostess, Lady Ottoline Morrell. (However, Hope’s correspondence with another of Morrell’s executors, Robert Gathorne-Hardy, reveals that trustees of the estate, especially Morrell’s family, ultimately blocked her involvement.) Whilst at Newnham, Mirrlees’s studies were carefully supervised by Harrison, who wrote letters to Hope’s mother and also visited Cranmer Road on occasion. Harrison wrote to both Lina and Hope in the summer of 1910 expressing her relief that an engagement between Hope and an unnamed man had been broken off. Judging from the tenor of these letters, Harrison doubted that Hope had found a suitable match, feeling that her ‘hour has not struck’.9 Jane wrote that she was looking forward to Hope’s return to Cambridge the following term. As it turns out, the man to whom Harrison refers was almost certainly the illustrator and painter Henry Justice Ford (1860–1941). Three letters from Ford – two addressed to Hope and one to her parents – reveal that Ford was indeed courting Hope and had visited the Mirrlees family in 1910. Ford was born in London and won a scholarship to attend Clare College, Cambridge, where he gained a First degree in classics. He later studied art at the Slade under the tuition of Alphonse Legros and fought as part of the Artists Rifles regiment during World War I. His most famous illustrations were for Andrew Lang’s hugely popular series of twelve Fairy Books for children, which Hope would certainly have read during her youth. Hope and Ford shared some common acquaintances in London – Ford ran with the likes of J.M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle – but, while it is impossible to say for certain, it is likely the two met through Mary MacCarthy, who wrote glowingly of meeting Ford in a letter to Hope. A lovesick Ford wrote to Mirrlees from London’s Saville Club in 1910, just before the funeral of King Edward:

I was so very sad and miserable all this afternoon that I had to come up here for human companionship. It is so horrid to be 60 miles away from you after being so close for two days. But I’ve cheered up a little playing billiards with some jolly fellows and so I can write a little letter and feel happy talking to you again darling thing. What a happy little time it was. Did you like it? I just look forward to next Sunday and in the meanwhile shall busily ply the drawings like till there are very few left to do. […] I think your dear father and mother are the sweetest kindest creatures in the world. They have been good to me, bless them. I think they must hate me coming and disturbing their peace so, and they are so nice about it. I don’t quite know how to thank them because there is nothing to say adequate. Dear pet are you happy? And tell me if you enjoyed seeing me. […]

Good night beloved. I send you a million kisses (and they ‘seem too few’ for me)

Henry

It is delicious hot and stuffy but it makes me rather a sleepy dog – but it is one that is not so sleepy to want his cat very badly tonight.10

From what little is in these letters, one comes away feeling that Ford is a frivolous character who pours his childish affections into unwilling hands. Perhaps Hope’s letters to Ford (which haven’t surfaced) would prove otherwise. But it hardly seems possible that these letters were written by a man of fifty, and considering that Hope was only twenty-three years old at the time, one may be able to see why the engagement dissolved. As for Jane’s letters to Hope and Lina, some of Jane’s biographers have read in them the concerned voice of a tutor, others may wish to find in them evidence of Jane’s attraction to and possessiveness of Hope. All of this centres on the question of whether or not the two women had entered into a romantic relationship – either in 1910 or later – a question that many of Harrison’s biographers have attempted to answer and others have skilfully avoided. While it may not be relevant to Harrison’s work, I would contend that inquiries into Hope’s writing that take sexuality into account deepen our understanding of the texts – especially her fiction. Therefore the nature of Harrison and Mirrlees’s relationship is relevant to Hope’s writing, not merely because the two women exchanged ideas and worked very closely on collaborative projects after Mirrlees left Newnham, but because of the intimately coded (and hence necessarily evasive) private intellectual life they subsequently shared. In a way that was not unlike the Mirrlees custom of family names, Jane and Hope referred to each other as ‘Elder’ and ‘Younger’ Wife or Walrus (‘EW’ or ‘YW’) in their letters. During Jane’s early days teaching at Newnham, three female students gave her a toy stuffed bear, which Jane named ‘OO’, short for ‘The Old One’. The Bear dwelled in the ‘Cave’ (Jane’s room) and had a totemic significance for Hope and Jane – he negotiated meetings between his ‘younger’ and ‘elder’ wife, and in part embodied their not only unconventional but impossible union by providing the ‘male’ aspect of a secret, fantasy marriage. A previously unpublished poem written by Harrison for Hope in 1921, entitled ‘To Her. A twilight poem’, makes reference to the Bear’s place as both women’s husband: ‘My husband chose her out / To be his concubine / His morganatic wife / And last – O joy divine / We dwell together free from strife / His younger and his elder wife.’11

The poem ends with the elder wife’s anxiety over separation and mortality; its ‘twilight’ is Harrison’s own advanced age and she offers a suggestive, half-lit obscurity of personal detail (Jane suggests that Hope is part Jewish, makes mention of their study of Russian in Paris and also references Hope’s first novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists).12 ‘Morganatic’, used to describe a (often polygamous) marriage entered into with a woman of lower standing, characterises the Bear’s superiority to Hope. The sign of the Great Bear, the constellation Ursa Major, also appears in their correspondence and, most significantly, at the end of Mirrlees’s Paris. And although Jane’s ‘poem’ isn’t a serious attempt at the form (she also wrote some cringe-worthy limericks for Hope), the paradigm of their relationship is laid out and the power structure that underlies it is clear: Jane and the ‘OO’ watch over the younger ‘concubine’ Mirrlees and she is a source of ‘joy divine’, companionship and amusement for the Bear and the Elder Wife. The Bear also had a special, additional meaning for Jane dating back to a research visit she made to the Acropolis years before she met Hope. In her memoir, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, Harrison writes:

The first time I went to Athens I had the luck to make a small archaeological discovery. I was turning over the fragments in the Acropolis Museum, then little more than a lumber-room. In a rubbish pile in the corner, to my great happiness, I lighted on a small stone figure of a bear. The furry hind paw was sticking out and caught my eye. I immediately had her – it was manifestly a she bear – brought out and honourably placed. She must have been set up originally in the precinct of Artemis Brauronia. Within this precinct, year by year, went on the arkteia or bear-service. No well-born Athenian would marry a girl unless she had accomplished her bear-service, unless she was in a word, confirmed to Artemis.13

Here the small stone figure of the ‘she bear’, essential to the maturation rites of Athenian women, takes on a symbolic importance: without her girls cannot become women nor can they be brought into the community through marriage. At the end of her life, Harrison wrote that she would have liked to have ‘founded a learned community for women, with vows of consecration and a beautiful rule and habit’. In some ways this was achieved through her life with Hope and certainly during her years at Newnham. These types of ‘vows’ or initiation rites in the Greek tradition were central to Harrison’s ideas about the essence of art, religion, and indeed drama:

I have elsewhere tried to show that Art is not the handmaid of Religion, but that Art in some sense springs out of Religion, and that between them is a connecting link, a bridge, and that bridge is Ritual. On that bridge, emotionally, I halt. It satisfies something within me that is appeased by neither Religion nor Art. A ritual dance, a ritual procession with vestments and lights and banners, move me as no sermon, no hymn, no picture, no poem has ever moved me; perhaps it is because a procession seems to me like life, like durée itself, caught and fixed before me.14

Ritual is the bridge extending into a forgotten past, and the space in which it can be experienced and re-experienced, an idea owing to Bergson’s concept of duration. The influence of Harrison’s ideas about ritual and religion on Hope’s novels has been the subject of scholarly enquiry, not the least because her most famous novel, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) begins with an epigraph taken from Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903). However, what is of greater interest, in this edition, is the presence of ritual in Mirrlees’s poetry, both before and after Jane’s death. Mirrlees herself reflected on the two women’s mutual influence whilst attempting to write Jane’s biography in the early 1930s:

Influence was hardly the word of [Jane’s] effect on me. It was, rather, re-creation. All the same, I know that I did have a great influence on her – she told me so. It was after we came back from Spain, she said to me that she had learned a great deal from me; from the way I attacked the whole of a civilisation, instead of just a part of it.15

It is clear that Hope believed in this ‘re-creation’, but how this might have been altered by Jane’s death is not as apparent. Did she carry on, as before, doing in her work what Jane supposedly admired her for, that is, attacking ‘the whole of a civilisation’? If Jane’s ‘attack’ was on religion or moralising theology, for instance, then how was Mirrlees’s revolutionary vision so total, so complete? It is hard to imagine. Mirrlees’s work, especially her novels, almost always entwines itself into the net of civilising forces: religion, cultural history, tradition, family. Her criticism is made from within, but in no way does it discredit these forces on a wider scale; generally speaking, her attack leaves intact some of the values one would expect Harrison to have railed against. More importantly, Mirrlees’s later poetry published in the 1960s is highly reverential of a cultural – particularly British, sometimes Catholic – past that only makes very light mockery of tradition (in one instance the hallowed halls of Oxbridge, where she imagines herself as an outsider). But before we consider Hope’s poetry in depth it is crucial to give an account of the years after she left Newnham and the time she spent living and studying in Paris.

It is almost possible to reconstruct loosely the years from 1913 to 1928 through surviving letters from Jane to Hope. In 1912 Jane wrote from Italy whilst she was en route to the Temple of Thermopylae to Hope, who was in Cambridge; in October 1913 Hope sojourned in Paris with Karin Costelloe (an early psychoanalyst who would later marry Virginia Woolf’s brother, Adrian) and the two women were introduced to Parisian literary society. We learn from a friend of Hope’s that she and Karin were invited to dine at the home of the poet Anna de Noailles, that they visited the English writer Mary Robinson (also known as Madame Duclaux) and that they lunched with Edith Wharton. (Wharton apparently snubbed them, and the two girls privately dubbed her ‘Old Warts’.) Jane visited her in April 1914 and then again in June. From 1915 onwards Hope wrote in her unfinished biography of Jane that ‘[Jane] gets a new lease of life from the joy of the discovery of Russian and Russia’, and we know that her study of Russian began in Paris that year. The two women spent 1918 almost entirely in Paris studying languages at the École des Langues Orientales. In the spring of 1919, Hope finished Paris: A Poem (1920) while presumably completing her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists, which was the product of many years’ work. During the first months of 1920, on a visit to Seville, Hope became afflicted with (at least from Jane’s report) typhoid fever and Hope’s parents were summoned. Once Hope had recovered, they both motored through Spain. Jane threw herself into learning Spanish and discovered a passion for the paintings of El Greco through the writings of Maurice Barrès.

It wasn’t until 1922 that Jane, having left her career and community behind at Newnham, burned her personal papers and went to live with Hope in Paris on a more permanent basis. According to Hope, her family required her to have a chaperone if she wished to settle in Paris and Jane was happy to oblige. Although Jane was ageing, and her health was failing – whilst in Paris, Harrison was under the care of a physician named Moutier in whom she (perhaps unwisely) invested a great deal of faith – the two women were able to carry on their lives together in Paris, as foreign women travelling and studying, in a way that would have been more noticeable in London. Before Virginia Woolf (known for her occasionally savagely formed opinions of people) went to visit the two women in Paris she wrote in a letter to Mary MacCarthy they had a ‘Sapphic flat somewhere’16 and had earlier complained to Clive Bell that Hope’s novel Madeleine was ‘all Sapphism so far as I’ve got – Jane and herself’.17 But whether or not Harrison and Mirrlees’s relationship was sexual (and Mirrlees herself claimed, coyly, that she wasn’t a ‘Sapphist in the strictest sense’) Paris allowed the two women a certain degree of freedom in a more liberal environment. Initially, Hope and Jane travelled through the French countryside – they went to Nancy to attend sessions on ‘optimistic autosuggestion’ by the psychologist Émile Coué and explored Burgundy. Both women appear to have taken Coué’s practices seriously – especially Jane, who wrote to Hope (during a brief period apart) that she had ‘Coué’d’ for two hours in an attempt to ward off loneliness.18 The Hôtel de Londres on the rue Bonaparte (in the 6ème arrondissement) was their first home together in Paris, but they soon had to move on, finding it unsatisfactory, in part because they could not take meals in their rooms. Through Bertrand Russell’s first wife, Alys, Jane and Hope managed to find more spacious and comfortable lodgings in the American University Women’s Club on the rue de Chevreuse in Montparnasse, where they lived from 1922 to 1925. The Club, founded by the wealthy American philanthropist Elizabeth Mills Reid in the first decades of the twentieth century, was established as a residence in 1922 for American postgraduate women in Paris. All of the comforts of American life could be found there – ‘admirable cooking of the best French kind (touched by American)’ – and the company of American women was at once irritating and comforting for Hope. She wrote to her mother that the Club was so desperate to have Jane as a resident that they offered her a sitting room free of charge if she would agree to stay.19 An article Hope wrote in 1927 for Time & Tide (reproduced in this edition) entitled ‘An Earthly Paradise’ contrasts their life in the substandard Hôtel de Londres with their experience at the rue de Chevreuse:

Fortunately for the weak and helpless there are many substitutes for the ‘Friend behind phenomena’ – good servants, for instance, kind aunts, a large balance at the bank. So if one is to realise adequately the horrors of the atheist’s universe, it is necessary for a period to be cut off from these kindly sources of comfort … abroad, say, in a little unfriendly hotel, managed by people as impersonal as the chauffage central, and as cold; where everything even a daily bath, is made as difficult as human, or rather, as devilish ingenuity can compass, so that a few innocent cases of books make one feel as guilty and as helpless as a murderer seeking for a hiding-place for the remains of his victim; and whence one is driven daily, whatever the weather, to seek like Lear, as a witty friend most feelingly put it, one’s omelette in the storm.20

In August of 1923 and 1924, Jane and Hope left Paris for the Abbaye de Pontigny in Burgundy, where the philosopher Paul Desjardins (with the assistance of Charles Du Bos) hosted the yearly Décades de Pontigny, which ran regularly from 1910 to 1940 and halted only during World War I. These décades lasted for ten days, with entretiens, or symposia, set around a literary, philosophical or religious question during the afternoons. The attendees were intellectuals, mostly from Europe or Britain – André Gide, Jacques Rivière, André Maurois, Paul Valéry, Jean Tardieu, Heinrich Mann and Lytton Strachey were among those invited – and the meetings were held in a Cistercian abbey bought by Desjardins. Jane wrote a glowing letter to Gilbert Murray about the 1923 décades in which she described Pontigny as ‘an amazing place’ with ‘perfectly managed’ entretiens.21 But in an undated letter to her mother, Hope wrote that she was utterly bored at Pontigny, and she remarked during a group gathering (presumably with dismissive sarcasm) ‘Moi je n’ai pas de vie intérieure!’ which, according to one of Jane’s biographers Annabel Robinson, ‘staggered the French’.22 Lytton Strachey wrote to Dora Carrington the same year about being at Pontigny, to which Carrington replied that she was ‘delighted to be spared such tortures’ as the entretiens.

But WHAT FIENDS! Mania, is too mild a word for deliberate torture. How can you discuss translation for ten afternoons from half past two until half past four? It just shows what the Frogs are to choose the dullest and stoggiest, the most unsympathetic hours of the day to try and shine in intelligence. I should make a speech if I was you. But not on translation. I should make a speech on ‘Imbecility in the Lower Animals, the Frogs’ in the style of Swift, (or perhaps Strachey). I should give the habits of the toads and frogs who congregated in an Abbaye. Mercifully I am spared my speech!

In the same letter she also urges Strachey to get close to Hope and Jane: ‘I think the Jane-Hope liaison interests me most. Win their confidences. I am sure they are a fascinating couple. [Boris] Anrep once gave me such an interesting account of them.’23

Whether or not Hope enjoyed Pontigny is debatable. Years later, when recollecting these years for Jane’s biography, Hope wrote that she and Jane made ‘delightful friends’ there, but this may have been an intentional misremembering. What is more interesting is how the discussion about translation may have affected Hope’s own work and the course of the following years. In 1924, Hope and Jane jointly began two works of translation from Russian, to be completed over the next three years: The Life of the ArchpriestAvvakum by Himself (1924) and, a further indulgence on the figure of the bear, The Book of the Bear (1926), twenty-one folk-tales. Robinson tells us that the theme of the décades of 1923 was ‘Y-at-il dans la poésie d’un people un trésor réservé, impenetrable aux étrangers?’ and that this topic broke down into more specific debates about the role of the poet and translator (who, therefore, begets a new audience for the poet) in different languages, cultures and nations. Jane’s affinity for all things Russian is well documented, most of all in Harrison’s own memoir. But the level at which Hope and Jane collaborated on these projects is difficult to decipher: there are no surviving manuscripts or notes for either book. We do know that during 1923 Hope completed her novel The Counterplot (1924) and that on 20 April 1924 she began writing what would become Lud-in-the-Mist (1926).24 In a letter to her mother she writes:

I began a new book on Sunday – the subtitle of which will possibly be A Story of Smuggling, Kidnapping and Adventures on the Borders of Fairyland (This is a secret!!!) It went swimmingly for three days and I wrote away at a great pace and then I stuck – as I knew nothing whatever about smugglers and hadn’t a background for the countryside. So I must get some books about smugglers and merchants and things.25

As for their collaborations in Russian – it seems unlikely that Hope was involved at any length in the translation of Avvakum. Jane didn’t receive the Russian manuscript until sometime after mid-May 1924 and by mid-June Hope was in London, staying with her mother near Hyde Park. But Jane and Hope had seen the manuscript – friends of theirs, the Russian émigré writer Alexei Remizov (1877-1957) and his wife Seraphima, owned a copy – and they had read it aloud at the Remizovs’ home.26 A July letter from Jane to D.S. Mirsky, the Russian critic and historian who had suggested translating Avvakum to Jane and procured the manuscript, suggests that while Hope was away, she and Mirsky would finish the book. The two met in Paris at the rue de Chevreuse to discuss the book and Mirsky wrote the preface. The speed at which Jane accomplished the translation of this seventeenth-century Old Russian text is remarkable – but modern translators have criticised her edition for its use of archaism (in effect, it appears that Jane pitched the language rather higher than the colloquial original). It is much more likely that Mirrlees and Harrison collaborated on The Book of the Bear, which Hope would have been translating whilst writing Lud-in-the-Mist. As the fantasy writer Michael Swanwick points out in his study of Mirrlees’s life and work, the influence of Alexei Remizov, a modernist writer of an almost Gothic sensibility, is visibile in her novel. Remizov, who was also a painter, was the subject of an article by Mirrlees published in a 1926 issue of Le Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique (reproduced in this edition). Remizov was the only living contributor to The Book of the Bear and certainly Mirrlees and Harrison’s decision to place the living folklorist alongside older (often anonymous) ones actively brings folklore into the present. In their introduction, they argue that Remizov ‘has evolved his elaborate style and intensely individual fantasy from the simple rhythms of Russian folk-tales’ and Remizov himself is described as an almost fairy creature, hoarding mysterious painted toys in his Paris flat. Putting aside some of the homogenising cultural myth about Russians that shape the introduction – and indeed the whole book, Russians are ‘Bears’ after all – we can imagine that Remizov’s example of making-new older ‘simple rhythms’ inspired Hope to develop her own ‘intensely individual fantasy’ in Lud. Swanwick, a well-informed reader of Mirrlees’s fantasy novel, suggests that Remizov ‘freed [Hope] from the strictures of realism’ and that fantasy provided a more successful mode of writing for the kinds of social critique (in the form of highly staged roman à clef) that formed the basis of Mirrlees’s previous two novels.27 Both Madeleine and The Counterplot are thinly (albeit ornately) disguised projections of Hope’s own family drama. Lud-in-the-Mist breaks from Hope’s rewriting of her own life and her being what Virginia Woolf described as ‘her own heroine – capricious, exacting, exquisite, learned and beautifully dressed’.28 In 1927, Newnham College’s magazine, Thersites, printed a review of Lud:

Misled by the notice of a fraudulent bookseller, I positively bought ‘Lud in the Mist’, thinking it to be a novel about Newnham. I think it worth mentioning this, because, terrible as were my rage and mortification on finding that the book was really a fairy story with a profound moral and psychological significance, they were insensibly charmed away by paragraph after paragraph of Miss Mirrlees’s spell. Personally I can never understand allegories, but I do not think this one spoils the story any more than that of Gulliver or the Faery Queen; the creation of Lud in the Mist, the town that has the unearthly glow of 16th century Flemish pictures and the ageless enchantment of a fairy tale, is so powerful that fantastic, mannered, as it is, one accepts it as ‘quite true’. To say that such things really are, and to make us believe it is to perform a very astonishing feat.

In Miss Mirrlees’s last novel ‘The Counterplot’, one detected a curious individual flavour, more subtly and completely individual than that of any modern writer I remember to have read. It is not accounted for by her conception of character or her approach to realism, and yet it informs both these; its tangible expression is, I think, her style, which in its elaborate yet clear-cut and deeply coloured nature suggests a series of pictures in mosaic. The inward feeling it gives is of a bitter sweet taste left upon the tongue, or of one of those scents, harsh and infinitely strange which one sometimes smells in filigree bottles in a curiosity shop. In one sense, ‘Lud in the Mist’ is a more suitable ground for Miss Mirrlees than a modern story; to my mind the drawback to the ‘Counterplot’ was that all-embracing pedantry, extending to every walk of life from the mediaeval Spanish convent to the naval smoke-room. One wearied of being told so much and so often what one either knew, or, not knowing, did not wish to know. About fairies, however, she cannot tell us too much: she must in fact, tell us everything as we go on, and leave nothing out. And what intimate revelations she makes to us of the intangible, the lovely and the strange!29

Certainly, one can extend this estimation of Mirrlees’s hyper-real style, which ‘suggests a series of pictures in mosaic’, to that of her poem Paris. According to Jane Harrison, Hope felt that Paris was ‘the end of her soul’ and it is clear that the city fuelled her literary aspirations.30 One imagines that – by sheer proximity – she was lured towards the iconoclasm of French language poets like Mallarmé, Reverdy, Cendrars, Apollinaire and Cocteau. Their influence – the visual and sonic layering, the use of white space, caesurae and a unique typeface, the interest in psychological time and the pervasive concept of durée – is certainly evident when one reads Paris. Mirrlees was exposed to the rapidly changing aesthetics on the French art scene – she was friends with Gertrude Stein and the painter Marie Blanchard – and through a connection of Roger Fry’s she was admitted to Auguste Pellerin’s monomaniacal private collection of Cézannes in the wealthy Neuilly district of Paris.

Harrison and Mirrlees stayed in Paris until Harrison’s health declined more seriously.31 On 30 September 1925, the two women left the American Women’s Club and wintered in the Midi, after what Jane described as ‘three strenuous years of Paris life’.32 In the spring of 1926 they returned to London and stayed for a few weeks in a maisonette on Weymouth Street before taking a lease on 11 Mecklenburgh Street, on the edge of Bloomsbury near the Gray’s Inn Road. In her notes for Jane’s biography, Hope describes the elder woman’s rapid mental and physical decline. We get a glimpse of a woman much reduced not only by age and sickness but also by her inability to develop her years of scholarship further.33 With the proceeds of The Book of the Bear, Hope and Jane rented the house of the eccentric novelist and suffragist Alice Dew-Smith in Rye for the summer. Because of a thrombosis, Jane was rushed back to London in an ambulance where she died of leukaemia on 15 April 1928.

After Jane’s death, Hope’s life becomes much less documented in the letters and memoirs of her contemporaries. Her remaining correspondents trail off in the 1940s. We know that in May 1928, Hope stayed with the writer Margaret Behrens – a mutual friend of hers and Jane’s – at Behrens’s home in Menton, a resort town on the Franco-Italian border long renowned for its health benefits. In 1929 she converted to Catholicism and settled in Kensington. As with everything she undertook, Hope devoted hours of scholarship to understanding Catholic doctrine. Although she was baptised Catholic soon after birth – in accordance with the religion of her father’s family – Hope had always ‘kicked against’ it, much like her parents who explored various religions before settling on Christian Science in the 1920s. Mirrlees’s archive holds an embossed certificate of acceptance from the Vatican, dated 29 December 1933. She records conversations with her priests and sermons, often warnings against sin, in her notebooks.