The Counterplot

(Helen) Hope Mirrlees (1887 - 1978) was a British translator, poet and novelist. She is best known for the 1926 Lud-in-the-Mist, a fantasy novel and influential classic and for Paris: A Poem, a modernist poem that critic Julia Briggs deemed "modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition." Mirrlees' 600-line modernist poem was the subject of considerable study by scholar Julia Briggs, and is considered by some literary critics to have had an influence on the work of her friend, T. S. Eliot and on that of Virginia Woolf. Mirrlees set her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919), in and around the literary circles of the 17th Century Précieuses and particularly those salons frequented by Mlle de Scudéry. Mirrlees later used medieval Spanish culture as part of the background of her second novel, The Counterplot (1924). Lud-in-the-Mist was reprinted in 1970 in mass-market paperback format by Lin Carter, without the author's permission, for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and then again by Del Rey in 1977. The "unauthorized" nature of the 1970 reprint is explained by the fact that, as Carter indicated in his introduction, he and the publishing company could not even ascertain whether the author was alive or dead, "since our efforts to trace this lady [Mirrlees] have so far been unsuccessful."