Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Viola Meynell
-
Standard Name: Meynell, Viola
Birth Name: Viola Mary Gertrude Meynell
Married Name: Viola Mary Gertrude Dallyn
Nickname: Prue
VM
wrote during the earlier part of the twentieth century. Her fairly slender output includes religious novels, poetry, essays, short stories, and book reviews. Her richly emotional and subtle style is often structured by Christian diction and allusion. She tends to give her central characters happy endings heavily freighted with the symbolism of re-birth, but intense penitence for past actions is often first demanded of her female protagonists. Her positive critical reception was perhaps coloured by the high literary standing of her mother; she has as yet awakened no serious revival of interest.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls Violet's feeling for the poet Julian Grenfella more serious attachment than that to Wellesley. Grenfell, who wrote at least one still-remembered poem (Into Battle) and...
Miller, Sarah, and Betty Miller. “Introduction”. On the Side of the Angels, Virago, 1985, p. vii - xviii.
xv
In wartime she met and immediately took to Adrian Stephen
,...
Friends, Associates
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Cynthia was also a friend of Viola Meynell
and of Enid Bagnold
, whose Sussex homes were close to that of the Asquiths during the Second World War. Thirkell, as well as Lawrence, Bagnold, and...
Friends, Associates
Evelyn Sharp
Others with whom she shared this or that memorable experience were the Meynells (Wilfrid
, Alice
, and Viola
), Clarence Rook
and his wife, and Henry W. Nevinson
, whom she eventually married...
Friends, Associates
Catherine Carswell
Catherine Jackson, her next-door neighbour Ivy Low
(who later married Maxim Litvinov
, who after the Russian Revolution became a Soviet diplomat), and Low's friend Viola Meynell
, shared an admiration for D. H. Lawrence's...
Friends, Associates
Eleanor Farjeon
Back in London she acquired a circle of largely musical friends, many of them later well-known names, including Myra Hess
and Clifford
and Arnold Bax
. Later this circle expanded to include literary people: Viola Meynell
Woolf met AM
in 1909 at a tea-party in Florence, Italy. She recorded her first, not entirely positive, impression: a lean, attenuated woman, who had a face like that of a transfixed hare....
Literary responses
Amber Reeves
After the appearance of her first three novels, two critics gave AR
a significant place in accounts of the current state of fiction. R. Brimley Johnson
characterised her as a sex-explorer, free from either...
Literary responses
Katherine Mansfield
After Mansfield's death, Woolf
wrote in her diary: it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won't read it.
Gunn, Kirsty. “How the Laundry Basket Squeaked”. London Review of Books, No. 7, pp. 25 - 6.
25
KM
appears in episodes in more than one novel by her friend...
Literary responses
Alice Meynell
The Pall Mall Gazette praised AM
's dramatic criticism in particular as the best of the age.
Badeni, June. The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell. Tabb House, 1981.
132
George Meredith
admired her devout but open mind, and declared that she would some day rank as...
The house stood on enough land for Wilfrid Meynell to build houses for his grown-up children to occupy when they came to visit. Other visitors included D. H. Lawrence
, who wrote The Rainbow while...