The thing that the scanned image can’t convey is that the cover paper is tissue-thin, and the gold is a beautiful dull metallic color. It’s also, as Julia Briggs has pointed out, the same paper the Woolfs used as endpapers in the Hogarth Press first edition of Jacob’s Room.

Holding Paris at the Bodleian was such an extraordinary experience not only because I quite like the poem and am so interested in Mirrlees, but also because Virginia Woolf hand-set the poem herself, bound it in this delicate paper, and then hand-corrected the final copies. The copy I examined came in a little box with a receipt, also written in Virginia’s handwriting, for a quarterly subscription to Hogarth Press’s literary output. Benjamin was right, I think; as much time as I’ve spent doing academic research on Mirrlees (and Woolf), there’s nothing quite like holding the artifact in your hands.

The Free State of Dorimare was a very small country, but, seeing that it was bounded on the south by the sea and on the north and east by mountains, while its centre consisted of a rich plain, watered by two rivers, a considerable variety of scenery and vegetation was to be found within its borders. Indeed, towards the west, in striking contrast with the pastoral sobriety of the central plain, the aspect of the country became, if not tropical, at any rate distinctly exotic. Nor was this to be wondered at, perhaps; for beyond the Debatable Hills (the boundary of Dorimare in the west) lay Fairyland. There had, however, been no intercourse between the two countries for many centuries.

The social and commercial centre of Dorimare was its capital, Lud-in-the-Mist, which was situated at the confluence of two rivers about ten miles from the sea and fifty from the Elfin Hills.

Lud-in-the-Mist had all the things that make an old town pleasant. It had an ancient Guild Hall, built of mellow golden bricks and covered with ivy and, when the sun shone on it, it looked like a rotten apricot; it had a harbour in which rode vessels with white and red and tawny sails; it had flat brick houses—not the mere carapace of human beings, but ancient living creatures, renewing and modifying themselves with each generation under their changeless antique roofs. It had old arches, framing delicate landscapes that one could walk into, and a picturesque old graveyard on the top of a hill, and little open squares where comic baroque statues of dead citizens held levees attended by birds and lovers and insects and children.

It had, indeed, more than its share of pleasant things; for, as we have seen, it had two rivers.

Also, it was plentifully planted with trees.

—Lud-in-the-Mist

I’ve just posted the first chapter of Lud-in-the-Mist so that those of you who haven’t read it can get a sense of the book’s tone and rhythm. There’s some angst about the novel’s copyright status—it was published four years after the magical cutoff for U.S. exemption and was originally published in the UK and has been in the public domain and then out again—so I’ve held off posting any till now.

Thing is, there are several small presses and print-on-demand outfits selling awful (ugly, typo-ridden, ill-printed) copies on Amazon without troubling themselves about copyright, so I’ve decided to publish this chapter here and suggest that you purchase the authorized and very reasonably printed edition published by Gollancz in the UK for a good reading experience.

Madeleine is almost impossible to acquire as a physical book unless you have access to one of the handful of libraries worldwide that hold a copy. The publication of this copy rests entirely on the labors of Ide Cyan, who spent countless hours scanning a library copy, running it through OCR, and correcting the text, then marking up the text. She has my sincere gratitude for all the work, and for allowing the result to be published here with my markup alterations.

Most of the few living humans who’ve read it have done so because they loved Mirrlees’ most famous novel, Lud-in-the-Mist, and Madeleine is a very different sort of book, so its reputation has remained dim. Having read it through a couple of times, I’ve found many points that connect up with Lud in surprising ways, but Madeleine is also an interesting text in its own right. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting some of my own thoughts, and now that the text is out in the wild, I hope to see some of yours as well.

…behind the ramparts of the Louvre
Freud has dredged the river and, grinning horribly,
waves his garbage in a glare of electricity,
Taxis,
Taxis,
Taxis,
They moan and yell and squeak
Like a thousand tom-cats in rut.
The whores like lions are seeking their meat from God :
An English padre tilts with the Moulin Rouge…

That’s from Paris: a Poem, the work for which Hope Mirrlees is best known in academic circles. Paris is a very visual poem, and it’s best experienced via the original 1920 edition, which you can buy if you have oodles of money, or in fascimile, which you can view now, if you don’t mind a slightly dodgy scan. (PDF download, 900KB)

I have this copy because the interlibrary loan librarians at Portland State University in 2005 were both kind and persuasive, and I am very grateful for their assistance.