The Poems of Alice Meynell

Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell (nee Thompson, 1847-1922) was a British writer, editor, critic, and suffragist, now best remembered as a poet. She was born in Barnes, London, but was brought up mainly in Italy and, whilst recuperating from one of her frequent illnesses, converted to the Catholic faith. Her first volume of poetry, Preludes, was published in 1875, illustrated by her sister Elizabeth (the artist Lady ELizabeth Butler 1846-1933), and whilst it received little public notice was warmly priased by Ruskin. In 1877 Alice married Wilfrid Meynell, a Catholic newspaper editor who had admired her poems on religious subjects. The couple settled in Kensington, became proprietors of magazines including The Pen and the Weekly Register, and went on to have eight children. Alice was one of the early founders of the Catholic women's organization, Catholic Women's Suffrage Society, in support of peaceful means for the achievement of equal suffrage rights for women, and she established and wrote for its newpaper The Catholic Suffragist. She was also vice-president of the Women Writers' Suffrage League. She was a regular contributor to numerous journals such as The Spectator, the Pall Mall Gazette and The Saturday Review, edited many volumes of poetry and published further volumes of her own poems, being twice considered for the role of Poet Laureate. Her later poems show her feminist concerns as well as her reactions to the events of the First World War. This complete collection of Alice Meynell's poems is reprinted from the McClelland and Stewart Canadian edition of 1923 and includes a portrait of the author reproduced from a drawing by John Singer Sargent.