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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_!
Author of “Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists”
“Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, a thing but imperfectly known, so much the better.”
London: 48 Pall Mall W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. Glasgow Melbourne Auckland
First Impression, December, 1923 Second ” February, 1924 Third ” April, 1924
Plasencia was a square, medium-sized house of red brick, built some sixty years ago, in those days when architects knew a great deal about comfort, but cared so little about line that every house they designed, however spacious, was uncompromisingly a “villa.” Viewed from the front, it was substantial and home-like, and suggested, even in the height of summer, a “merry Christmas” and fire-light glinting off the leaves of holly; from the back, however, it had a look of instability, of somehow being not firmly rooted in the earth—a cumbersome Ark, awkwardly perched for a moment on Ararat, before plunging with its painted wooden crew into the flood, and sailing off to some fantastic port.