Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell was a British writer, editor, critic, and suffragist, now remembered mainly as a poet.
Early years and family
Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson was born in Barnes, London, to Thomas James and Christiana Thompson. The family moved around England, Switzerland, and France, but she was brought up mostly in Italy, where a daughter of Thomas from his first marriage had settled. Her father was a friend of Charles Dickens, 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!" Alice married Wilfrid Meynell in 1877, had eight children, Sebastian, Monica, Everard, Madeleine, Viola, Vivian, Olivia, and Francis. Viola Meynell became a writer, known mainly for fiction, and the youngest child Francis Meynell became a poet and a printer who co-founded The Nonesuch Press.
Career and writing
Preludes was her first poetry collection, illustrated by her elder sister Elizabeth. The work was warmly praised by Ruskin, although it received little public notice. Ruskin especially singled out the sonnet "Renouncement" for its beauty and delicacy. After Alice converted whilst recuperating from one of her frequent illnesses, and she had written love poetry like 'After a parting and 'Renouncement' for the young Jesuit priest who guided her to faith, Father Augustus Dignam, the entire Thompson family converted to the Catholic Church, and her writings migrated to subjects of religious matters. This eventually led her to the Catholic newspaper publisher and editor Wilfrid Meynell in 1876, whom she married the next year and they settled in Kensington. They became the proprietors and editors of such magazines as The Pen, the Weekly Register, and Merry England, among others. 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. 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 '.... Surely England has endured too long what is not only immodest but profoundly immoral, reports were shared from eleven branches 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. Meynell wrote in The Tablet against Father Henry Day who inLiverpool and Manchester 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'. Meynell was much involved in editorial work on publications with her husband, and in her own writing, poetry and prose. She wrote regularly for The World, The Spectator, The Magazine of Art, the Scots Observer, The Tablet, The Art Journal, the Pall Mall Gazette, and The Saturday Review. Her poems show her feminist concerns as well as her reactions to the events of World War I. The poet Francis Thompson, down and out in London and trying to recover from his opium addiction, sent the couple a manuscript. His poems were first published in Wilfrid's Merry England, and the Meynells became a supporter of Thompson. His 1893 book Poems was a Meynell production and initiative. Another supporter of Thompson was the poet Coventry Patmore. Alice had a deep friendship with Patmore, lasting several years, which led to his becoming obsessed with her, forcing her to break with him. She wrote the article on Patmore for the Catholic Encyclopedia''. At the end of the 19th century, in conjunction with uprisings against the British, 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.
Prose and Poetry – 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 and by one as Alice Meynell: Prose and Poetry. Centenary Volume, while another reports a 2007 facsimile editionProse and Poetry, 1847–1922. There may be the title of a 1970 issue as Prose and Poetry,.
