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.
