Meynell, Alice Christiana Gertrude

(1847-1922)

   Born Alice Thompson in Barnes, London, she spent several years in Italy and France. She converted to Catholicism in 1868 and married the journalist Wilfrid Meynell (also a convert to Catholicism) in 1877. From 1881 to 1898 they edited The Weekly Register and the monthly Merry England. Both magazines contain many of Alice's essays, as do several other periodicals in England, Scotland and Ireland. The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays (1891) ensured her place in the literary world. In 1894 she started writing a weekly article in the Pall Mall Gazette. She lectured on Dickens, the Brontës, and seventeenthcentury poetry in the United States in 1901-1902. In addition to the poetry anthologies she edited, and her essays, she wrote Holman Hunt (1893), Ruskin (1900), The Work of John S. Sargent (1903), and The Second Person Singular (1921). She died in London. Her poetry publications: Preludes, 1875. Poems, 1893. Later Poems, 1902. Last Poems, 1923. Some of his poems: "Advent Meditation," "Beyond Knowledge," "Free Will," "In Honour of America, 1917," "Nurse Edith Cavell," "On Keats's Grave," "Renouncement," "Your Own Fair Youth."

   Sources: Chapters into Verse, Vol. I: Genesis to Malachi. Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder, eds. Oxford University Press, 1993. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Poems of Alice Meynell at ELCore.Net (http://poetry.elcore.net/Catholic Poets/Meynell/). The Poems of Alice Meynell. Oxford University Press, 1940. The Poems of Thomas Gordon Hake. Alice Meynell, ed. AMS Press, 1971. Victorian Women Poets: An Antholog y. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds, eds. Blackwell, 1991.