Viola Meynell

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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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Violet Trefusis
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...
Family and Intimate relationships Alice Meynell
Alice Thompson married Wilfrid Meynell , a journalist and editor who had converted to Catholicism at eighteen.
AM 's daughter-biographer Viola Meynell , however, dated her parents' wedding to the autumn 1877.
Meynell, Viola. Alice Meynell: A Memoir. J. Cape, 1947.
61
Badeni, June. The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell. Tabb House, 1981.
67
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
98
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
19
Family and Intimate relationships Alice Meynell
AM 's fifth child was Viola Meynell . She became a poet and novelist, and published a memoir of her mother in 1929.
Meynell, Viola. Alice Meynell: A Memoir. J. Cape, 1947.
prelims
Friends, Associates Betty Miller
BM 's friends included Olivia Manning , Rosamond Lehmann , Stevie Smith , Inez Holden , Viola Meynell , and Eleanor Farjeon .
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
Friends, Associates F. Tennyson Jesse
Gordon Place became the centre of an active female literary community, which included Elizabeth Bowen , Rose Macaulay , Virginia Woolf , Ivy Low (who was also a good friend of Viola Meynell ), Ivy Compton-Burnett
Literary responses Alice 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...
Occupation Naomi Jacob
The Women's Emergency Corps was founded by a group of women, including actresses Eva and Decima Moore and (according to Jacob) Gertrude Kingston . Jacob's fellow volunteers there included Stella Benson and Viola Meynell ....
Residence Alice Meynell
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...

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