Lud-in-the-Mist - Mirrlees, Hope

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Résumé :
Fairy fruit is being smuggled into Dorimare. Lud-in-the-Mist, the highly influential early fantasy novel you've never heard of, but praised by numerous authors throughout the years. Originally published in 1926. In its main character, Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, Mirrlees prefigures Bilbo by a decade, in a setting not unlike Hobbiton. More recently the book's influence has been felt most strongly in works such as Stardust and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It is the story of Lud-in-the-Mist in Dorimare, a small, sleepy and unimaginative town that borders the land of Fairy, but has cut itself off from completely for hundreds of years. Fairy fruit which sends men mad is now being smuggled in and given to children, old mysteries are dug up, and it is up to Master Nathaniel to get to the bottom of it all. Jo Walton says it is beautifully written, charming, funny, and always just a little creepy, and Lin Carter paints it as sturdy as a painting by Breughel, as delicate as the breath of a hummingbird's wing. Michael Swanwick says it's diffuse influence runs like a scarlet thread through the body of serious fantasy today. This new edition also includes Hope Mirrlees's other influential, very modernist, piece of writing: Paris, a Poem, originally published in 1920 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf through their own Hogarth Press....

Biographie:
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Sommaire:
(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 Pr?cieuses and particularly those salons frequented by Mlle de Scud?ry. 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....