Selected Poems and Essays

‘A nightingale and loneliest of fire-flies
Palpitate in the darkness light and strain,
Tho’ thine own stars be stifled in soft skies,
And thine own music mute, for any pain.’

Alice Meynell was a major British author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is the first anthology of her verse and prose to be published for over seventy-five years. Meynell was highly regarded both as a poet and as a writer of essays and, on two occasions, was seriously proposed for the laureateship. G.K. Chesterton said of her that she ‘never wrote a line, or even a word, that does not stand like the rib of a strong intellectual structure; a thing with the bones of thought in it’.

The present selection includes the early romantic poems of yearning, full of poignant surprises, and the terser, less personal poems of her maturity. Also included is a broad sample of Meynell’s literary essays, in each case a careful work of art. They include reflections on literature, culture and the natural world, nuanced observations on childhood, and moving defences (both specific and general) of women against trespasses on their dignity. Running through her work is a commitment to accurate observation, fairness, justice and responsibility, and a lifelong concern with the conflicts between passion and will, between ‘wildness’ and restraint.

A foreword is also offered by the renowned feminist critic and theorist Laura Mulvey, who is Alice Meynell’s great-granddaughter.