On First Looking into Hope Mirrlees' 'Madeleine'

Hope Mirrlees in 1931 (Wikimedia Commons)

A couple of years ago, I read Lud-In-The-Mist (prompted, I confess, by a reviewer comparing Good Red Herring to Hope Mirrlees’ classic), and recently read it again for the purposes of writing a short article about the author. For the latter endeavour, I also started reading Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists, much more of a struggle. There are two drawbacks: this is a novel about a person’s inner life or lived experience, or both, and this is a novel with A Point to make. The first is not something that usually ignites my enthusiasm, the latter often does not make for good literature.

Something else that struck me when I started reading it were the strong, pealing echoes of reading Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. I have not yet read far enough to know if there are any meaningful overlaps, but there are certainly a few surface-level ones between the authors themselves. The most minor: Hope Mirrlees and Radclyffe Hall both dropped their more distinctly-feminine first names (Helen and Marguerite, respectively) and were known by their less specific family names. They were contemporaneous (Hall born in 1880 was about seven years older) and both came from private wealth; moderate in the case of Mirrlees, eye-watering in Hall’s. 

Both converted to Catholicism in adult life, and in both cases, religion influenced their writing. Jansenism was an 18th century Catholic movement focused on reconciling two theological concepts, those of divine grace and of free will. Hall wrote a number of books that were specifically religious in theme, including A Saturday Life, and The Master of the House. Both writers had significant relationships with women. Radclyffe Hall described herself as a ‘congenital invert’, a phrase from Havelock Ellis, and seems to have had relationships with almost any woman she met. She wrote The Well with the specific intention of presenting lesbianism in a sympathetic light. Much less is known of Hope Mirrlees’ biography, so while she lived for thirty years with the Classicist Jane Harrison, it is assumed rather than known that their relationship was sexual or romantic. 

Mirrlees and Hall both had a literary connexion with Virginia Woolf. When The Well was put on trial for obscenity, Woolf spoke in its defence, and went to the trial as a witness, though her concern was less for the book itself—which fellow Bloomsbury-ite Lytton Strachey described as ‘pretty frightful’—and more the fact of censorship. The Hogarth Press, set up by Woolf with her husband, published Hope Mirrlees’ poem Paris, and Woolf seems to have been a great personal admirer of hers, as was T.S. Eliot. 

It remains to be seen if Madeleine is in any way similar to The Well; having, heaven help me, done an undergraduate essay on that wretched thing, I can say with confidence that no-one will ever have had occasion to describe anything by Hall as ‘modernism’s lost masterpiece’, as Julia Briggs did of 'Paris', The first few pages of Madeleine are not encouraging—perhaps I should have tried Mirrlees’ only other novel, The Counterplot, incidentally now in its centenary year of publication. Nevertheless, let us plough on.