‘Forgotten’ Newnham poet to be celebrated in BBC documentary

Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison

The life and work of a Newnham alumna once described by Virginia Woolf as ‘her own heroine – capricious, exacting and very learned’ will be featured in a BBC Radio 3 programme on Sunday.

Hope Mirrlees, writer and poet, arrived at Newnham College in 1910 to read Classics having already met the great classical scholar Jane Harrison who became her tutor.

Mirrlees later travelled and lived in Paris with Harrison, who was credited with inventing the role of professional female academic, until Harrison’s death.

Her poem, Paris, was published in 1920 by Hogarth Press, a publishing house founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. The 600-line modernist poem, described as ‘extraordinarily daring and brilliant’ depicts the French capital as it struggles to recover from the First World War.

Set within a single day, it features a collage of overheard snatches of conversation on the newly-opened Metro, children’s games, ancient Greek jokes, French double entendres, musical notation, advertising jingles, memorials carved into gravestones, the cries of street vendors and much more.

During the BBC Radio 3 programme, Dr Sandeep Parmar, who teaches English at the University of Liverpool, traces the poem from the house in the Rue de Beaune, which Hope Mirrlees shared with Jane Harrison, across the Seine to the Tuileries Gardens, up to seedier corners of Montmartre and back down to the doors of Notre Dame.

She speaks with Lauren Elkin, the author of a recent book on women walking in Paris, Flaneuse; with Geoffrey Gilbert from the American University of Paris; and Professor Mary Beard, Newnham Fellow, who wrote a biography of Jane Harrison.

Listen to the Hope Mirrlees in Paris programme on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday, November 20 2016 at 18.45.