Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlees was a British poet, novelist, and translator, born in 1887. She is best known for Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), a fantasy novel that later became a cult favorite, and for Paris: A Poem (1920), an adventurous modernist work published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press.

She studied Greek at Cambridge and was closely connected to the classicist Jane Harrison, who was an important influence on her life and work. Mirrlees also wrote the novels Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists and The Counterplot, and her range extended beyond fiction into translation and biography.

Although she published relatively little, her writing has had a long afterlife. Readers return to her for the unusual mix of elegance, intelligence, and dreamlike imagination that runs through her work.