Hope Mirrlees, 1887 – 1978

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

Hope Mirrlees was a pioneering Modernist writer and the partner of British classicist, Jane Ellen Harrison, with whom she resided at 4 rue de Chevreuse from 1922 – 1925. Raised in Scotland and South Africa, Mirrlees studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before enrolling at Newnham College, Cambridge University, to study Greek with Harrison. The two lived together from 1913 until Harrison's death in 1928. Despite an age difference of 37 years, Harrison and Mirrlees shared a deep connection and a love of learning foreign languages. They studied Spanish and Russian together, produced two Russian translations as a pair, and Mirrlees even earned a Diploma in Russian from the École des Langues Orientales (today’s Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales – INALCO) while they lived in Paris.

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

Mirrlees published her 600-line Paris: A Poem with Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1920. A truly Modernist text that depicts the French capital in its recovery from WWI, it supposedly influenced two close friends of Mirrlees, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. "Set within a single day, it features a collage of overheard snatches of conversation on the newly-opened Metro, children’s games, ancient Greek jokes, French double entendres, musical notation, advertising jingles, memorials carved into gravestones, the cries of street vendors and much more." (Newnham College News, Nov. 18, 2016)

Mirrlees wrote fiction, including three novels, as well as non-fiction, notably a biography of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton published in 1962. In addition to Eliot and Woolf, she counted among her friends Gertrude Stein, Bertrand Russell, and Lady Ottoline Morrell. After Harrison's death, Mirrlees converted to Catholicism, moved to South Africa for 15 years (1948 – 1963), and quietly lived out the rest of her days in England until she passed away 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.
  • 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.