Lud-In-The-Mist

The single most beautiful and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century
A Shakespearian tragi-comedy, a murder mystery and a multi-faceted allegory all in one; and a damn good story, too
What we have here is that rarest of creatures, the fantasy novel of ideas
[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
Lud-in-the-Mist is a prosperous country town situated where two rivers meet: the Dawl and the Dapple. The Dapple springs from the land of Faerie, and is a great trial to Lud, which rejects anything 'other', preferring to believe only in what is known, what is solid.

Nathaniel Chanticleer, a dreamy, melancholy man, is deliberately ignoring a vital part of his own past; a secret he refuses even to acknowledge. But with the disappearance of his daughter, and a long-overdue desire to protect his son, he realises Lud is changing - and something must be done.

'A Shakespearian tragi-comedy, a murder mystery, and a multi-faceted allegory all in one; and a damn good story, too' Mary Gentle

(Helen) Hope Mirrlees (1887 - 1978) was a British translator, poet and novelist. She is best known for the 1926 Lud-in-the-Mist, a fantasy novel and influential classic and for Paris: A Poem, a modernist poem that critic Julia Briggs deemed "modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition." Mirrlees' 600-line modernist poem was the subject of considerable study by scholar Julia Briggs, and is considered by some literary critics to have had an influence on the work of her friend, T. S. Eliot and on that of Virginia Woolf. Mirrlees set her first novel, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919), in and around the literary circles of the 17th Century Précieuses and particularly those salons frequented by Mlle de Scudéry. Mirrlees later used medieval Spanish culture as part of the background of her second novel, The Counterplot (1924). Lud-in-the-Mist was reprinted in 1970 in mass-market paperback format by Lin Carter, without the author's permission, for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and then again by Del Rey in 1977. The "unauthorized" nature of the 1970 reprint is explained by the fact that, as Carter indicated in his introduction, he and the publishing company could not even ascertain whether the author was alive or dead, "since our efforts to trace this lady [Mirrlees] have so far been unsuccessful."