Hope Mirrlees

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Much of the sparse information currently available on HM focuses on her lasting personal relationship with eminent scholar Jane Harrison rather than her own body of writing, which includes poetry, novels, and biographies (published and unpublished). But as critic Mary Beard notes: To see Mirrlees only in the context of Jane Harrison . . . is to underrate her. She is one of those writers forever on the brink of being discovered (in the 1990s as much as in the 1920s) . . . . and like all such forgotten writers, she is an uncomfortable challenge to the arbitrariness of literary fame.
Beard, Mary. The Invention of Jane Harrison. Harvard University Press.
138-9

Milestones

8 April 1887

HM was born at Erpingham near Chislehurst in Kent.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

By October 1919

HM published her first novel, Madeleine; One of Love's Jansenists, a historical treatment of lesbian love.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

May 1920

The Hogarth Press published HM 's avant-garde poem Paris, in an edition of 175 copies, as one of its earliest publications.
Woolmer, J. Howard, and Mary E. Gaither. A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917-1946. Woolmer/Brotherson.
6
Briggs, Julia. “The Wives of Herr Bear”. London Review of Books, pp. 24-5.
25

1926

HM published her most popular work, the fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

1976

HM published a poetry volume, Moods and Tensions: Poems; she had privately printed the smaller Moods and Tensions: Seventeen Poems in 1965. Raymond Mortimer , a long-standing friend, wrote an introduction for the new book.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1 August 1978

Poet and novelist HM died at ninety-one years of age at Goring.
Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A to Z. Facts on File.
161
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Influences

8 April 1887

HM was born at Erpingham near Chislehurst in Kent.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

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