Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell (née Thompson; 11 October 1847[1] – 27 November 1922[2]) was a British writer, editor, critic, and suffragist, now remembered mainly as a poet. She was considered for the position of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom twice, first in 1892 on the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and later in 1913 on the death of Alfred Austin, but was never appointed to the position.[3][4]
Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson was born in Barnes, London on 11 October 1847 to Thomas James and Christiana (née Weller) Thompson, a painter and concert pianist.[4] The family moved around England, Switzerland, and France, but she was brought up mostly in Italy, where a daughter of her father's from his first marriage had settled. Her father was a friend of Charles Dickens,[1] and Meynell suggests in her memoir that Dickens was also romantically interested in her mother, noting that he had said to Thomas Thompson, "Good God, what a madman I should seem if the incredible feeling I have conceived for that girl could be made plain to anyone!"[5]
Meynell suffered from ill health during her early life, and in 1868, during a bout of illness, converted to Roman Catholicism. During this time, she reportedly fell in love with the Jesuit Priest, Father Augustus Dignam, who had helped her in her conversion. Dignam is believed to have inspired Meynell's love poems "After Parting" and "Renouncement."[4] By 1880, her entire family had also converted to Catholicism.[6]
In 1876, Meynell met newspaper editor and fellow Catholic convert Wilfrid Meynell (1852-1948), who was five years her junior, and they married in 1877.[6] The couple had eight children: Sebastian, Monica, Everard (1882–1926), Madeleine, Viola, Vivian (who died at three months), Olivia, and Francis. Viola Meynell (1885–1956) became a writer, known mainly for fiction, who later wrote a biography of her mother titled The Life of Alice Meynell (1932).[7] Her youngest child Francis Meynell (1891–1975) became a poet and a printer who co-founded The Nonesuch Press.[8]
Career
Writing and publishing
In 1875, Meynell published Preludes, her first poetry collection, illustrated by her elder sister Lady Elizabeth Butler (1846–1933). The work was warmly praised by John Ruskin, who especially praised the sonnet "Renouncement" for its beauty and delicacy, though although it received little public notice otherwise.[9][10]
After their marriage in 1877, Meynell and her husband became a proprietors and editors of various magazines, including The Pen, the Weekly Register, and Merry England, among others. Meynell was highly involved in the editorial work of these publications.[8]
The poet Francis Thompson, who was homeless and suffering from an opium addiction, sent the couple a manuscript. His poems were first published in the Meynell's paper Merry England, and the couple became supporters of Thompson.[13] His 1893 book Poems was published by the Meynells.
Meynell also had a deep friendship with Coventry Patmore, whose poetry she supported,[6] that lasted several years. In 1893, Coventry gave Meynell the manuscript for The Angel in the House, his best-known work, as a token of their friendship.[3] Eventually, Patmore became obsessively in love with Meynell, leading her to end their friendship.[14] She wrote the article on Patmore for the Catholic Encyclopedia.[15]
Sargent requested Meynell to write the introduction for a collection of his works, titled The Works of John S. Sargent, R.A., in 1903.[20]
Critical reception
In March 1923, a few months after Meynell's death, Jeanette Marks published a retrospective of Meynell's works in the North American Review. She criticized Meynell's "religiosity" and "deliberate and labored moral judgments," but praised Meynell's embrace of "the multitude,"[21] writing that:
To Alice Meynell the last curiosity was not of art but of life itself; it is the disparity between destiny and nature; the trivial transmission of a life that is nevertheless great, the vulgar experience of love that is none the less real, the "heroic virtue" of death committed to the keeping of us all; the gravity of mortality greater than that of immortality.
Also in 1923, Harriet Monroe wrote of Meynell's writing, "There is a crying need for a complete edition of Alice Meynell's verse and prose...Sometimes her quest of an austere beaty is carried too far toward preciosity, but often she attains without effort a severe clarity and precision which the rising generation will do well to study."[13]
Meynell's work has continued to be praised and studied in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with contemporary scholars including Angela Leighton[22] and Linda Austin[23] having published articles on Meynell and her work.
Activism
At the end of the 19th century, in conjunction with uprisings against the British (among them the Indians', the Zulus', the Boxer Rebellion, and the Muslim revolt led by Muhammad Ahmed in the Sudan), many European scholars, writers, and artists, began to question Europe's colonial imperialism. This led the Meynells and others in their circle to speak out for the oppressed. Alice Meynell was a vice-president of the Women Writers' Suffrage League, founded by Cicely Hamilton and active 1908–19.[24]
Meynell, unknown date
Meynell was one of the early founders of the Catholic women's organisation, Catholic Women's Suffrage Society in support of peaceful means for the achievement of equal suffrage rights for women.[25] Meynell established and wrote in the first edition of its newspaper The Catholic Suffragist, in 1915, that 'a Catholic suffragist woman is a graver suffragist on graver grounds and with weightier reasons than any other suffragist in England (sic)'.... Surely England has endured too long what is not only immodest but profoundly immoral,[26] reports were shared from eleven branches (including a national congress in Wales and two societies in Scotland) and the editorial said 'We dare to say that if the balance of power between men and women had been more equal the world over, we should not still be settling international disputes by swamping a continent in blood and turning Europe into a shambles.[26]
Meynell wrote in The Tablet against Father Henry Day who preached against votes for women risking 'bringing a revolution of the first magnitude'. Meynell retorted 'I say, most gravely, the vaster the magnitude of the revolution, the better.' Where Day saw 'danger' Meynell saw a 'fortress of safety' for Catholic women, and she saw anti-suffrage rhetoric as 'insolence'.[27]
Upon Meynell's death, Jeannette Marks wrote, "Like a child my mind has kept step with hers for many years, and like a child it still runs beside her, looking up, using her living words, following her thought. In the 'running' I have lost account of time; and now, they say, she is dead...Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude!"[21]
Prose and Poetry (Jonathan Cape, 1947) – multiple editors, centenary publication with a biography and critical introduction by Vita Sackville-West
The latter publication is catalogued by one WorldCat library as Prose and Poetry of A. Meynell, 1847–1922 (OCLC 219753450) and by one as Alice Meynell: Prose and Poetry. Centenary Volume (OCLC 57050918), while another reports a 2007 facsimile edition Prose and Poetry, 1847–1922. There may be the title of a 1970 issue as Prose and Poetry, OCLC630445893.
Archer, William (1902). "MRS. MEYNELL". Poets of the Younger Generation; with Thirty-Three Full-Page Portraits from Woodcuts by Robert Bryden. London and New York: John Lane. pp. 264-270. Retrieved 23 January 2019 – via Internet Archive.
External links
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