Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) has been regarded as a lost modernist. Her extraordinary long poem Paris, written in 1919, is a journey through a day in post First World War Paris. It was considered by Virginia Woolf 'obscure, indecent, and brilliant'. Read today, the poem retains its exhilarating daring. Mirrlees's experimentalism anticipates 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scholar to gain access to the Mirrlees Archive at Newnham College, Cambridge, and her edition includes many previously unpublished poems discovered there in draft form.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.

About the Author

Helen Hope Mirrlees was born on 8 th April 1887 in Chislehurst, Kent. She grew up in Scotland and was educated at St Leonard's School in St Andrews. She briefly attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before entering Newnham College, Cambridge in 1910, to study classics. There she met the classics scholar Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) and the two women became companions until Harrison's death. Hope Mirrlees visited Paris intermittently from 1913 onwards, before taking up residence there with Harrison in 1922. The two women studied Russian at the �cole des Langues Orientales and translated two works from the Russian: The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself (1924) and The Book of the Bear, a collection of Russian folktales (1926). Mirrlees's first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919) was followed by her long poem Paris, published by the Hogarth Press in 1920. Two other novels were published in the 1920s, The Counterplot (1924) and the fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). After Jane Harrison's death, Mirrlees converted to Catholicism and, in the 1940s, moved to South Africa. Three slim volumes of her poetry appeared during these later years, which culminated in the Amate Press edition of Moods and Tensions (1976), introduced by Raymond Mortimer. In later life, she returned to England and died at the age of ninety-one on 1st August 1978.

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