E-text prepared by
Mary Glenn Krause, Charlene Taylor,
University of Chicago, Shawna Milam,
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THE COUNTERPLOT
Miss Hope Mirrlees, when she wrote Madeleine,several years ago, was recognised to be one of themost promising of the younger school of womennovelists.
The Counterplot is a study of the literary temperament.Teresa Lane, watching the slow movementof life manifesting itself in the changinginter-relations of her family, is teased by thecomplexity of the spectacle, and comes to realisethat her mind will never know peace till, bytransposing the problem into art, she has reducedit to its permanent essential factors. So, fromthe texture of the words, the emotions, the interactionsof the life going on around her she weavesa play, the setting of which is a Spanish conventin the fourteenth century, and this play performsfor her the function that Freud ascribes to dreams,for by it she is enabled to express subconsciousdesires, to vent repressed irritation, to say thingsthat she is too proud and civilised ever to havesaid in any other way. This brief summary can givebut little idea of the charm of style, the subtletyof characterisation, and the powerful intelligencewhich Miss Hope Mirrlees reveals. The play itselfis a most brilliant, imaginative tour de force!
THE
COUNTERPLOT
by
HOPE MIRRLEES
Author of “Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists”
“Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation ofthe future, and if the past which it is sought to restoreis a dream, a thing but imperfectly known, so much thebetter.”
Miguel de Unamuno.
LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
Copyright
| First | Impression, | December, 1923 |
| Second | ” | February, 1924 |
| Third | ” | April, 1924 |
Manufactured in Great Britain
TO
JANE HARRISON
Μάλιστα δέ τ’ ἔκλυον αὐτοί
1
Plasencia was a square, medium-sized house of redbrick, built some sixty years ago, in those days whenarchitects knew a great deal about comfort, but caredso 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 “merryChristmas” and fire-light glinting off the leaves ofholly; from the back, however, it had a look of instability,of somehow being not firmly rooted in theearth—a cumbersome Ark, awkwardly perched for amoment on Ararat, before plunging with its paintedwooden crew into the flood, and sailing off to somefantastic port.
It is possible that this effect was not wholly due to theindifferent draughtsmanship of the Victorian architect,for there is a hint of the sea in a delicate and boundless