The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Counterplot, by Hope Mirrlees

THE COUNTERPLOT

Miss Hope Mirrlees, when she wrote Madeleine, several years ago, was recognised to be one of the most promising of the younger school of women novelists.

The Counterplot is a study of the literary temperament. Teresa Lane, watching the slow movement of life manifesting itself in the changing inter-relations of her family, is teased by the complexity of the spectacle, and comes to realise that her mind will never know peace till, by transposing the problem into art, she has reduced it to its permanent essential factors. So, from the texture of the words, the emotions, the interactions of the life going on around her she weaves a play, the setting of which is a Spanish convent in the fourteenth century, and this play performs for her the function that Freud ascribes to dreams, for by it she is enabled to express subconscious desires, to vent repressed irritation, to say things that she is too proud and civilised ever to have said in any other way. This brief summary can give but little idea of the charm of style, the subtlety of characterisation, and the powerful intelligence which Miss Hope Mirrlees reveals. The play itself is a most brilliant, imaginative tour de force!

TO
JANE HARRISON

Μάλιστα δέ τ’ ἔκλυον αὐτοί