Hope-In-The-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlees is easily the most mysterious of the great twentieth-century fantasists. She wrote one important work of modern fantasy, Lud-in-the-Mist, and then abruptly fell into silence. Her single professionally published poem was only the fifth work put out by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, and is considered by critics to be a significant and possibly even important modernist work. But, despite her long and enduring friendship with T S. Eliot, she never followed it up. She was a fringe member of the twentieth century's single most prestigious literary sorority, the Bloomsbury group, and yet by 1970 she was almost completely forgotten. There are no biographies of her, few pictures, and personal information is dauntingly difficult to find. The mists of time have closed around her. Still, traces remain. With patience, it is possible to gather together these widely-scattered references to Mirrlees, and so assemble a rough sketch of her life and achievements. Let this slim book serve as a beginning. Two hundred thirty copies printed: five copies, lettered A-E, for presentation, twenty-five copies, numbered 1-25, specially bound, signed by the authors and with an original illustration signed by Charles Vess, and two hundred copies in paper covers.