British Author
Born 1881 Died 1944
Leopold Hamilton Myers was born at Leckhampton, Grange Road in Cambridge on the 6th September 1881, the eldest of the three children of Frederic William Henry Myers. His father was a writer and founder member of the Society for Psychical Research, his mother Eveleen Tennant was one of the early pioneers of photography.
Leopold was educated at Eton College, spent a year in
Germany, and was then briefly at Trinity College, Cambridge until his father's death in January 1901. He then accompanied his mother on a trip to the United States for a pre-arranged 'meeting' with her deceased husband. Sadly his father failed to turn up, but Leopold did have "a mystical experience in a hotel bedroom in Chicago". However his American trip did enable him to
meet his future wife. Elsie, the daughter of General William Jackson Palmer, the founder of Colorado Springs, Colorado;
although he had to wait another seven years before she finally
agreed to marry him, after which they went to live at Marlow in
Buckinghamshire in 1908 where they had two daughters.
Although Leopold was employed at the trade department of the
Foreign Office during World War I, he had inherited a
considerable amount of money from his godfather in 1906 and had no
particular need to work for a living. He therefore spent his time
socialising and eating at fashionable restaurants, travelled
widely and amused himself by racing at Brooklands and flying
balloons.
His first published work was a play Arvat, which
appeared in 1908 and since he was under no pressure to write for a
living it was some years before his next work, the novel The
Orissers (1922) followed by another novel The
Clio which appeared in 1925.
He became best known for his sequence of novels set in
sixteenth century India during the reign of Akbar, the Great
Moghul Emperor. These were by no means historical novels, as he
was cavalier in his treatment of facts and only used the
historical setting as a device to examine contemporary issues on
the basis,"that we might view them better from the distant vantage
ground of an imaginary world". This triology of novels was
completed with the publication of The Root and the
Flower in 1935 which won both the Femina Vie Heureuse
Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and later
followed by a fourth book The Pool of Vishnu
He was briefly associated with the Bloomsbury Group and later
during the 1930s he came to think of himself as a member of the
left-wing intelligentsia and professed to be a communist. He was
however widely regarded as an arrogant snob and had a distinct
tendency to pick arguments and fall out with most people he met.
His writing reflected his concerns with issues of spirituality and
religious philosophy, and Leopold was well versed in the major
texts of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism as well as
contemporary works on philosophy and the new science of
psychology. But although his Chicago experience convinced him of
the reality of the spiritual dimension, he never came to any firm
conclusions.
Towards the end of his life he wrote an autobiography but was
so disatisifed with the results that he destroyed every copy, and
began to suffer from serious depression. During the night of 7th
April 1944 he took an overdose of the sedative Veronal and was
found dead the following morning at his home on the Oxford Road in
Marlow.
Bibliography
Plays
The Indian trilogy (*)
Other novels
(* This trilogy of novels Were collectively republished in
Britain in 1943 as The Near and the Far and in the United
States in 1945 as The Root and the Flower. The third
novel appeared as The Root and the Flower in Britain and
as Rajah Amar in the United States. The use of the
American versions of the titles now seems to be more common.)
REFERENCES
Sophia Creswell, ‘Myers, Leopold Hamilton (1881–1944)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/authors/7458
http://www.booksellerworld.com/lh-myers.htm