Hope Mirrlees

Born in 1887, Hope Mirrlees was a British poet, novelist, translator, and biographer. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she developed a close connection with the classicist Jane Harrison, an important influence on her intellectual life and writing.

She is most widely remembered for Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), a fantasy novel that later became deeply admired within the genre, and for Paris: A Poem (1920), an adventurous modernist work published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press. Her writing crossed genres easily, combining wit, learning, and an unusual imaginative freedom.

Later in life, she also devoted years to historical research, publishing A Fly in Amber in 1962, a work on Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. Although she was never a prolific author, her reputation has steadily grown, and she is now often seen as a distinctive, hard-to-classify voice in both fantasy and modernist literature.