Alice Meynell 1847–1922

Alice Meynell, edited by Alex Wong, Selected Poems and Essays (Carcanet Classics, 2025), has a preface by Alice’s great-granddaughter Laura Mulvey and an introduction by the editor, the poet Alex Wong.

She is a much-neglected poet, a convert and feminist, who is remembered today for rescuing the better-known poet Francis Thompson from the “gutter” and addiction and, with her husband, publishing his early works.

Below is printed The Lady Poverty, chosen as it reflects Alice’s Catholicism and her social concern, contrasting St Francis’s embrace of holy poverty with the abject distress of the nineteenth-century poor.

This remarkable poet was President of the Society of Women Journalists and Vice-President of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League. She deserves to be remembered and, better still, read.

Incidentally, the Meynells were both converts and in no way related to the North Riding recusant family of the same name.