From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Helen Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) was a translator, poet and novelist. She is best known today for Lud-in-the-Mist, a novel generally regarded as one of the most influential (though very much obscure) works in fantasy literature.
She was a friend of Virginia Woolf, who described her in her diaries as "a very self conscious, wilful, prickly and perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well dressed and pretty, with a view of her own about books and style, an aristocratic and conservative tendency in opinion and a corresponding taste for the beautiful and elaborate in literature." Her circle of celebrity acquaintances also included T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell.
