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.
During her time in Munich and her briefer time in Oberammergau, AMH
wrote articles which were published in the Ladies' Companion, the Athenæum, and Household Words. Her description of the Oberammergau passion...
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
Friends, Associates
Mary Howitt
MH
served on the reception committee for Harriet Beecher Stowe
at the time of her visit to England in April 1853. She had by that time become friendly with titled people and with members of...
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...
Travel
Anna Brownell Jameson
By this date ABJ
was travelling in Italy with Bessie Parkes
.
Johnston, Judith. Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters. Scolar Press.
ABJ
's views on women and work were taken up with enthusiasm by Bessie Rayner Parkes
, Barbara Leigh Smith
, and other Langham Place Group
members who combined their efforts to found the English...
Textual Features
Anna Brownell Jameson
ABJ
lent her writings as well as her moral support to these young feminists, by permitting extracts from her work to appear in the Waverley Journal during the period when Bessie Rayner Parkes
and others...
Friends, Associates
Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde
During the 1860s she and her husband formed a friendship with Bessie Rayner Parkes
.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
13
Birth
Marie Belloc Lowndes
MBL
, the elder of two children, was born at 11 George Street, Marylebone, in lodgings, since her mother
had returned from France for the birth but her grandmother
did not want it to...
Textual Production
Marie Belloc Lowndes
MBL
's four-volume autobiography closed with A Passing World, posthumously published. It does not mention the fact that its title re-uses that of one of her mother
's books and echoes that of one of her own.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Family and Intimate relationships
Marie Belloc Lowndes
Her English mother, who conducted her distinguished feminist writing career as Bessie Rayner Parkes
, had married at thirty-eight (after converting to Catholicism about three years earlier). She met her husband while renting a chalet...
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...
Textual Features
Marie Belloc Lowndes
She was asked by Reginald Smith
, editor of the Cornhill, to contribute an account of her mother
's young days, but she did not feel I could assent to his wish.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. The Merry Wives of Westminster. Macmillan.