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Alice Christiana Meynell

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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ALICE CHRISTIANA MEYNELL (1850-), English poet and essayist, was the daughter of T. J. Thompson. Her early life was spent chiefly in Italy, and she was educated by her father. Her first volume of verse, Preludes (1875), illustrated by her .sister Elizabeth, afterwards Lady Butler, attracted little public notice, but the delicacy and beauty of the poems and especially of the sonnet " Renunciation," were warmly praised by Ruskin. She married in 1877 the well-known Roman Catholic journalist and author Wilfrid Meynell, who became proprietor and editor of the Weekly Register. Under W. E. Henley's editorship she wrote regularly in prose for the National Observer, and also later for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Saturday Review, &c. Her Poems (1893), including much of the earlier volume of Preludes, brought her at last more definitely before the public; and this was followed in 1901 by another slender book of delicate verse, Later Poems. Mrs Meynell also showed herself a fine critic of poetry by her admirable selection, The Flower of the Mind (1897), an anthology of English verse. She edited the Selected Poems (1894) of T. G. Hake, the Poetry of Pathos and Delight (1896) of her intimate friend Coventry Patmore, and the selections from Patmore in the Muses' Library." Her prose essays, remarkable for fineness of culture and peculiar restraint of style, appeared in successive volumes as The Rhythm of Life (1893), The Colour of Life and other Essays (1896), The Children (1897), and The Spirit of Place (1898). Later books are London Impressions (1898) and The Work of John S. Sargent (1903).

See W. Archer, Poets of the Younger Generation (1902).