Hope Mirrlees – författare

A true classic - and the 'single most beautiful...and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century' Neil GaimanLud-in-the-Mist is a prosperous country town situated where two rivers meet: the Dawl and the Dapple. The Dapple springs from the land of Faerie, and is a great trial to Lud, which rejects anything 'other', preferring to believe only in what is known, what is solid. Nathaniel Chanticleer, a dreamy, melancholy man, is deliberately ignoring a vital part of his own past; a secret he refuses even to acknowledge. But with the disappearance of his daughter, and a long-overdue desire to protect his son, he realises Lud is changing - and something must be done.

"Den är ett litet gyllene mirakel, den här boken". Så skriver Neil Gaiman i förordet till Hope Mirrlees roman från 1926. Mellan älvlandet och havet ligger den fria staten Dorimar. I huvudstaden Dunkelros lever borgmästaren Gyllenkamme ett stillsamt och behagligt liv, tills det en dag visar sig att hans tolvårige son ätit av den förbjudna älvfrukten. Boken blev från 1970-talet en kultbok i fantasykretsar. Detta är den första svenska översättningen någonsin. Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) var en engelsk författare, översättare och poet. Hon var god vän med Virginia Woolf och TS Eliot och levde och skrev under många år tillsammans medklassicisten och feministen Jane Harrison.

Centenary edition of 'modernism's lost masterpiece'.

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scholar to gain access to the Mirrlees Archive at Newnham College, Cambridge, and her edition includes many previously unpublished poems discovered there in draft form.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.Julia Briggs OBE was Professor of Literature and Women’s Studies at De Montfort University. Among her many influential publications were a biography of E. Nesbit and her acclaimed Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. She died in 2007.Cover Painting Juan Gris (1887-1927), Breakfast, 1915. Oil on canvas. Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris / Peter Willi / The Bridgeman Art Library