Lud-In-The-Mist

Summary

Legendary fantasy storyteller Hope Mirrlees captures imagination in this wonder-binding novel filled with fairies, fear, and wonder with unsuspecting citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist!

"modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition." Julia Briggs.

Hope Mirrlees continues the exploration of the themes of Life and Art, by a method already described in the preface of her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919): "To turn from time to time upon the action the fantastic limelight of eternity, with a sudden effect of unreality and the hint of a world within a world". Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) is the third and final novel by British writer Hope Mirrlees. Lud-in-the-Mist's unconventional elements, responsible for its appeal to the fantasy readership, are understood better if they are analyzed in the context of her whole oeuvre. In this novel, the prosaic and law-abiding inhabitants of Lud-in-the-Mist, a city located at the confluence of the rivers Dapple and Dawl, in the fictional state of Dorimare, must contend with the influx of fairy fruit and the effect of the fantastic inhabitants of the bordering land of Faerie, whose presence and very existence they had sought to banish from their rational lives. When the denial proves futile, their mayor, the respectable Nathaniel Chanticleer, finds himself involved reluctantly with the conflict and obliged to change his conventional personal life and disregard the traditions of Lud-in-the-Mist to find a reconciliation.