Leo Myers

Leo (Leopold) Hamilton Myers (1881–17 September 1944) was a British novelist.

Life

He was born in Cambridge into a cultured family; his father was the writer Frederic William Henry Myers and his mother the photographer Eveleen Tennant. He was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. 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. 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 late in life broke with most of them.Adrian Wright, The Past is a Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley (1996), p, 131. In the 1930s he wrote in sympathy with Marxist thought, and became increasingly pessimistic in his outlook. He committed suicide in 1944.

He was on the edge of the Bloomsbury group, and knew L. P. Hartley,Adrian Wright, The Past is a Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley (1996), p, 91. Aelfrida Tillyard and Max Plowman. He kept up a lengthy correspondence with Olaf......
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