Hope Mirrlees, 1887 – 1978

Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison (Newnham College Archives, Cambridge University)

Born Helen Mirrlees in Kent in 1887, she became a pioneering Modernist writer and the partner of British classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. Raised in Scotland and South Africa, Mirrlees studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before attending Newnham College, Cambridge, to study Greek under Harrison. The two lived together from 1913 until Harrison's death in 1928, first residing in a Paris hotel at 3 rue de Beaune (1913–1919), and later at the American University Women’s Club (1922–1925). Despite their 37-year age difference, Harrison and Mirrlees shared a profound connection and a mutual passion for learning languages. Together, they studied Spanish and Russian, collaborated on two Russian translations, and Mirrlees even earned a Diploma in Russian from the École des Langues Orientales (now INALCO) while they lived in Paris.

Mirrlees and Harrison in Paris in 1915, Newnham College Archives, Cambridge University

In her early twenties, Mirrlees published Paris: A Poem, a 600-line work released by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1920. This Modernist piece, capturing the French capital in its post-WWI recovery, is believed to have influenced her friends Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. Paris unfolds over a single day, presenting a collage of the city’s sounds and sights: fragments of overheard conversations on the newly opened Metro, children’s games, ancient Greek jokes, French double entendres, musical notations, advertising jingles, inscriptions on gravestones, street vendors’ calls, and much more (Newnham College News, Nov. 18, 2016). For an analysis of the poem, listen to poet Sandeep Parmar's BBC podcast, New Generation Thinkers.

Mirrlees went on to write both fiction, including three novels, and non-fiction, most notably a 1962 biography of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton. In addition to her friendships with T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, she was close with Gertrude Stein, Bertrand Russell, and Lady Ottoline Morrell. Following Jane Ellen Harrison’s death, Mirrlees converted to Catholicism and spent 15 years living in South Africa (1948 – 1963) before returning to England, where she lived quietly until her death at the age of 91 in 1978.

Hope Mirrlees, vintage snapshot print by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1936, National Portrait Gallery, London

Sources

  • "'Forgotten' Newnham poet to be celebrated in BBC documentary." Newnham College News online, November 18, 2016.
  • Harrison, Jane Ellen and Hope Mirrlees. The Book of the Bear: Being twenty-one tales newly translated from the Russian. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1926.
  • Levin, Sophie. Hope Mirlees.
  • Mirlees, Hope. A Fly in Amber, Being an Extravagant Biography of the Romantic Antiquary Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, Faber & Faber, 1962.
  • Mirrlees, Hope. Collected Poems. Edited with an introduction by Sandeep Parmar. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2011.
  • Mirrlees, Hope. Paris: A Poem. Richmond: Printed by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1919.