Helen Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) was a British author of novels and poems, whose three novels are Lud-in-the-Mist, Madeleine, and Counterplot, and a book of poetry, Moods and Tensions: Poems. She was one of the Bloomsbury Group and counted among her good friends T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats and Virginia Woolf.
The single most beautiful, solid, unearthly and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century ... a little golden miracle of a book A Shakespearian tragi-comedy, a murder mystery, and a multi-faceted allegory all in one; and a damn good story, too [Mirrlees has] a view of her own about books and style ... and a corresponding taste for the beautiful and elaborate in literature The tone is assured and urbane, with aphorisms dripping from every other sentence and a real sense of the menacing and the bizarre. It has been a major influence on genre fantasy since its republication in the late 1960s - Cambridge Guide to Women Writers [involves] fundamental questions of how a society and its members understand their own history, and how they make sense of the conflicts embedded in social class and political power - TLS