Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Bessie Rayner Parkes
-
Standard Name: Parkes, Bessie Rayner
Birth Name: Elizabeth Rayner Parkes
Nickname: Bessie
Married Name: Elizabeth Rayner Belloc
Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Belloc)
, a late nineteenth-century feminist, focused her writings especially on issues relating to women's work. During her life she published a collection of miscellaneous essays, a collection of vignettes, numerous articles in periodicals, a travel book, and political treatises. Though her feminist writings have been better recognized, her passion was poetry. She published a lengthy philosophical poem in addition to three volumes of poems, some of which were later compiled into a collection.
In one of the many tributes published at the time of her death in 1934, friend and writer Marie Belloc Lowndes
(daughter of feminist Bessie Rayner Parkes
) said that CADSwrote certain remarkable novels...
Literary responses
Anna Mary Howitt
Mary Howitt
called the Boadicea picture very fine, truly sublime.
Lee, Amice. Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt. Oxford University Press.
216
Ruskin
had demanded in a letter: What do you know about Boadicea? Leave such subjects alone and paint me a pheasant's wing.
Lee, Amice. Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt. Oxford University Press.
217
Bessie Rayner Parkes
Literary responses
Mary Bosanquet Fletcher
Three biographies appeared in the years following MBF
's death, and went through many re-issues. Local memory of her remained strong (as instanced by the Memorial Chapel at Leyton Wesleyan church), and so did international...
Literary responses
Mary Catherine Hume
Bessie Rayner Parkes
recommended this work to George Eliot
. Eliot was not pleased with it and wrote, Heaven preserve me from reading Miss Hume's poems! . . . I was quite cowed by their...
Literary responses
Violet Hunt
Sooner or Later received (perhaps excessively) high praise from a number of VH
's contemporaries. Marie Belloc Lowndes
(daughter of Bessie Rayner Parkes
) wrote in The Merry Wives of Westminster, 1946, that it...
Literary responses
Adelaide Procter
This poem was highly regarded by Bessie Rayner Parkes
. Critic Gill Gregory
reads it as a powerful critique of Keble
's authoritative voice and an unsettling of key Tractarian tenets, stemming from AP
's revisionary poetics.
Gregory, Gill. The Life and Work of Adelaide Proctor. Ashgate.
85
Literary responses
Adelaide Procter
The Athenæum carried a brief review by H. F. Chorley
congratulating the journal (and in effect himself) on having early recognised that AP
belonged to the Golden Book of English poetesses.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1989 (1865): 799
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
A...
Leisure and Society
George Eliot
When the Leweses celebrated their move to The Priory and their son Charlie's promotion and twenty-first birthday with a party, Clementia Taylor
and one or two other women attended, but Bessie Rayner Parkes
did not...
Intertextuality and Influence
Marie Belloc Lowndes
MBL
decided in her teens that she wanted to be a writer. In 1887, with the encouragement of her mother
(who was based in France) the two of them embarked on a winter in the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Christina Rossetti
In From the Antique, a dramatic lyric composed on 28 June 1854,
Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. Editor Crump, Rebecca W., Louisiana State University Press.
3: 449
CR
's speaker laments: It's a weary life, it is: she said:— Doubly blank in a woman's lot: I wish...
Intertextuality and Influence
Marie Belloc Lowndes
The title phrase, in its original Latin, suggests a wealth of allusions. It famously appears on a tombstone in more than one painting of a classical scene, suggesting words spoken by the tomb's occupant, or...
Intertextuality and Influence
George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans had been reading Das Leben Jesu by David Friedrich Strauss
when she was persuaded by her new circle of liberal friends at Coventry to take on the task of translating it into...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dora Greenwell
Throughout the essay DG
relates her arguments to those of John Stuart Mill
, Anna Jameson
, and Bessie Rayner Parkes
, and though she agrees with them on certain points (mainly their call for...
Health
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
Her friend Bessie Rayner Parkes
was alarmed at her appearance.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia. Macmillan.
