Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell (née Thompson) was born in Barnes, Surrey (now London), in 1847 to a middle-class family of artistic and intellectual inclinations. She and her sister Elizabeth, later Lady Butler, a celebrated historical painter, wee brought up in somewhat Bohemian style in various locations, including Liguria and the Isle of Wight. In 1868 Alice converted to Roman Catholicism and at around the same time fell in love with Father Dignam, the priest who received her into the Church. This impossible love informed many of her early poems. Her first volume of verse, Preludes, was published by Henry S. King in 1875 with illustrations by her sister. In the following year she met Wilfrid Meynell, a young journalist and fellow Catholic convert who admired her poems, and they married in 1877. (The name is pronounced to rhyme with ‘fennel’.) The Meynells worked both jointly and independently on journalistic work, co-editing and copywriting for several periodicals as well as writing literary and critical essays, signed and unsigned, for others. They became important figures in the London literary world. Approached by the Catholic poet Francis Thompson, a homeless opium-addict seeking publication, they published and promoted his work and supported him financially and morally for the rest of his life. They had eight children, of whom one died in infancy. Several of the Meynell children became involved in literary life.

Alice Meynell became established as a prolific and highly respected essayist, especially from the 1890s when her work began to be collected into books. The republication early in that decade of her youthful poems, along with a small number of more recent ones, also raised her reputation, and in later life she returned to more frequent writing in verse. Her books of essays and poems, published at first mainly by John Lane at The Bodley Head and from 1913 by Burns and Oates, were many times reprinted, and she was in high demand as a columnist and reviewer. An outspoken advocate for women’s suffrage as well as other political causes, she was President of the Society of Women Journalists and Vice-President of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League. On two occasions she was proposed for the role of Poet Laureate. She inspired ardent and devoted friendships, notably in the poet Coventry Patmore (whose passionate love for her necessitated a painful break in their friendship) and in George Meredith during his final years. In 1911 the Meynell family moved to Greatham, Sussex. Alice Meynell died in 1922 at the age of seventy-five.