- Leo Myers
Leo (Leopold) Hamilton Myers (1881 – 1944) was a British novelist.
He was born in
Cambridge into a cultured family; his father was the writerFrederic William Henry Myers and his mother the photographerEveleen Tennant . He was educated atEton College andTrinity College, Cambridge . His trilogy/tetralogy "The Root and the Flower", set inIndia at the time ofAkbar , is his major work and was recognised by the award of the 1935James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.He was independently wealthy from his mid-20s, travelled and began to write. He married the American Elsie Palmer (1873-1955), a friend of
John Singer Sargent who painted her. He made many friends of different kinds (and quarreled with most of them): he was on the edge of theBloomsbury group , knewL. P. Hartley ,Aelfrida Tillyard andMax Plowman , and corresponded withOlaf Stapledon . 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.In the 1930s he wrote in sympathy with
Marxist thought, and became increasing pessimistic in his outlook. He committed suicide in 1944.The designer
E. Q. Nicholson was his daughter.Works
*"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
*Geoffrey Herman Bantock (1956) "L.H.Myers: a critical study"
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