L.H. Myers

Leopold Hamilton Myers (6 September 1881 – 7 April 1944) was a British novelist.

Life

File:Leopold Hamilton Myers; Eveleen Myers (née Tennant) by Mendelsohn.png

with his mother

Myers was born in Leckhampton House, Cambridge into a cultured family; his father was the writer Frederic William Henry Myers (1843-1901) and his mother the photographer Eveleen Tennant (1856-1937).<ref name=hamilton54>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=odnb>Cresswell (2004)</ref> He was named after his godfather, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany.<ref name=hamilton54/> He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge.<ref>Template:Acad</ref> His trilogy/tetralogy The Root and the Flower, set in India at the time of Akbar, is his major work and was recognised by the award of the 1935 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

He did not visit India, and his writings about it have been seen by some critics as reflecting his own intellectual milieu and its concerns. He was independently wealthy from his mid-20s, travelled and began to write. In 1908 he married the American Elsie Palmer (1873–1955), daughter of General William Palmer,<ref name=odnb/> and a friend of John Singer Sargent, who painted her. He made many friends of different kinds, and late in life broke with most of them.<ref>Adrian Wright, The Past is a Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley (1996), p, 131.</ref> In the 1930s he wrote in sympathy with Marxist thought, and became increasingly pessimistic in his outlook.Template:Clarify He committed suicide on 7 April 1944 by taking an overdose of Veronal.<ref name=odnb/><ref name=origo>Caroline Moorehead. Iris Origo: marchesa of Val d'OrciaTemplate:Dead link, Boston: David R. Godine, 2002 (1st ed. London: John Murray, 2000). Template:ISBN. p. 256.</ref><ref name=hamilton9>Template:Cite book</ref>

He was on the edge of the Bloomsbury group and knew L. P. Hartley,<ref>Adrian Wright, The Past is a Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley (1996), p, 91.</ref> Aelfrida Tillyard and Max Plowman. He kept up a lengthy correspondence with Olaf Stapledon.<ref>Robert Crossley, Olaf Stapledon; Speaking for the Future (1994), p. 194.</ref> Other friends were David Lindsay,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Frank Dobson,<ref>Malcolm Easton, Frank Dobson's 'Cornucopia' (Hull University Art Collection), The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 111, No. 795 (Jun., 1969), pp. 382-386.</ref> and Charles le Gai Eaton.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> By an anonymous loan he helped George Orwell travel to Morocco in 1938, to convalesce from tuberculosis.<ref>Jeffrey Meyers, George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1997), p. 16.</ref>

The designer EQ Nicholson was his daughter.

Works

File:Miss Elsie Palmer.jpg

Elsie Palmer, painted by John Singer Sargent

• Arvat (1908) verse drama
• The Orissers (1922)
• Clio (1925)
• The Root and the Flower
  • The Near and the Far (1929)
  • Prince Jali (1931)
  • Rajah Amar (1935), published as The Root and the Flower
• Strange Glory (1936)
• The Pool Of Vishnu (1940) now sometimes included as part 4 of The Root and the Flower

References

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External links

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• Enotes page