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.
MBL
made her views known to the public through the columns of the Times on a variety of political and literary issues: women's suffrage, food rationing during the first world war (on which she offered...
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...
Occupation
John Stuart Mill
JSM
served as independent MP for Westminster from 1865 to 1868.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press.
Mill, John Stuart, and John Jacob Coss. Autobiography. Columbia University Press.
vii
The Concise Dictionary of National Biography: From Earliest Times to 1985. Oxford University Press.
AP
may have converted to Roman Catholicism
from Anglicanism by this date; certainly she had by 1851.
Sources conflict on the date of AP
's conversion, most of them dating it in 1851. Bessie Rayner Parkes
Travel
Adelaide Procter
The year-long visit in 1853-54 to her aunt Emily de Viry
, a Catholic convert who was associated with the court at Turin, had a formative influence on AP
's life and religious beliefs...
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
wrote of her grief to Bessie Rayner Parkes
: Adelaide's death is as a light gone from among us.
Hirsch, Pam. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon 1827-1891: Feminist, Artist and Rebel. Chatto and Windus.
210
AP
was buried in the Catholic St Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green...
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
Textual Production
Adelaide Procter
AP
was involved with her reform-minded friends, including Bessie Rayner Parkes
, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
, and Matilda M. Hays
, in helping to found the English Woman's Journal in 1858. She later contributed...
Textual Production
Adelaide Procter
According to Bessie Rayner Parkes
, Procter had to be urged to publish the collection. The first series, which was issued at a price of 5 shillings by Bell and Daldy
, had another edition...
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...
Reception
Adelaide Procter
By 1877 AP
was said to be second only to Tennyson
in the sales of her work, and, as Bessie Rayner Belloc
said, her poems must have penetrated into every reading household in Great Britain...
Friends, Associates
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
wrote to Charlotte Yonge
a few years later, lamenting: oh! what a pity it is that we are all growing old who have had such happy happy times with one another.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters. Editors Bloom, Abigail Burnham and John Maynard, Ohio State University Press.
242
She uttered...
Friends, Associates
Christina Rossetti
Around this time she became aware of her brother Dante Gabriel
's involvement with Elizabeth Siddal
, although she and Siddal met only in 1854 and were never intimate friends. Close family friends of Christina...
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...