Bessie Rayner Parkes

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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.
Sepia toned photograph of Bessie Rayner Parkes, seated on an upholstered chair, with an ornate table next to her. Her hands are clasped in her lap, she is wearing a dark dress with a voluminous skirt and long sleeves. She has dark, wavy, shoulder-length hair.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates George Eliot
Bessie Rayner Parkes (already a friend of Marian Evans—later GE ) introduced her to Barbara Leigh Smith , who became her close confidant and supporter.
Karl, Frederick R. George Eliot: Voice of a Century. W.W. Norton, 1995.
136
Friends, Associates Anna Mary Howitt
Family biographer Carl Ray Woodring numbers AMH with a group of Pre-Raphaelite sisters, including Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon) , Bessie Rayner Parkes , and Margaret Gillies , who associated themselves with innovation in...
Friends, Associates George Eliot
Some of her closest friends were prominent feminists, and they were among those soonest willing to flout convention and visit her after her union to Lewes.
Despite the social and spiritual gulf between them, GE
Friends, Associates Pamela Frankau
Her aunt Eliza Aria introduced the very young PF to many of her older, god-like friends: first of all actress Sybil Thorndike and writers Michael Arlen and Osbert Sitwell .
Frankau, Pamela. I Find Four People. I. Nicholson and Watson, 1935.
133-4
Later came John Van Druten
Friends, Associates Adelaide Procter
Other intimate feminist friends of AP 's adult years, in addition to Matilda Hays , were Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon . Procter was also a member of the Portfolio Society ...
Friends, Associates Jessie Boucherett
Partly through her membership of the Kensington Society (a social and political discussion group of about fifty women inaugurated in 1865), JB broadened her acquaintance with significant members of the feminist movement, including Frances Power Cobbe
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, 1941.
4
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...
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, 1979–1990, 3 vols.
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
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 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...
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...
Literary responses Anna Mary Howitt
Mary Howitt called the Boadicea picture very fine, truly sublime.
qtd. in
Lee, Amice. Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt. Oxford University Press, 1955.
216
Ruskin had demanded in a letter: What do you know about Boadicea? Leave such subjects alone and paint me a pheasant's wing.
qtd. in
Lee, Amice. Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt. Oxford University Press, 1955.
217
Bessie Rayner Parkes
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, 1998.
85

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