Born: 22 September 1847, United Kingdom
Died: 27 November 1922
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
Alice Meynell, an English poet, essayist and critic, born in London, daughter of Thomas J. Thompson, an intimate friend of Dickens. She was educated by her father, and her early life was chiefly spent in Italy.
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 were warmly praised by Ruskin.
In 1877 she married Wilfrid Meynell, the journalist and author, and contributed a number of important articles to English magazines. A second book of poems brought her more definitely before the public, and in 1897 she published The Flower of the Mind, an anthology of English verse, in which he showed herself a fine critic of poetry by her admirable selection. Mrs. Meynell’s prose essays are remarkable for their fineness of culture and peculiar restraint of style.
Some of her books are: The Rhythm of Life, The Spirit of Place, Lives of Ruskin and Samuel Johnson, London Impressions, Essays, etc.
IW note: Meynell was also a noted suffragist, who served as vice-president of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, and was one of the early founders of the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society.