Myths of Passage: Paris and Parallax

Abstract

Given the kind of thinking, as well as some of the specific themes, that have entered into, if not transformed, the study of Modernism in recent years, it is difficult to understand why Hope Mirrlees’s ambitious 450-line modernist poem Paris (1920), which Julia Briggs has termed ‘modernism’s lost masterpiece’,1 and Nancy Cunard’s Parallax (1925),² which remains virtually unknown, have not been at the centre of the discussion. Hope Mirrlees (1887–1978) wrote only occasional poetry after Paris but is more widely known as a novelist, especially for her fantasy Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which is felt to have ‘influenced genre fantasy since its republication in the late 1960s’.³ Whilst studying classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, she developed a close relationship with Jane Harrison, whose own fame has resulted in Mirrlees’s achievements being somewhat eclipsed in favour of speculation about the nature of their relationship. Mirrlees’s friendship with and influence on her sometime lodger T.S. Eliot is also rarely considered although Julia Briggs has now pointed out good reasons for doing so.