May Kendall

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May Kendall is most notable for late-nineteenth-century poems characterized by sharp humour and sarcastic wit on topics related to evolutionary science and the new woman. Her novels employ sarcasm and irony to examine British society, particularly the fruitlessness of philanthropy. Early in the twentieth century she collaborated with Andrew Lang on a social reform novel and fairy tale, and with Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree on treatises on working-class poverty that urged legal reform and a minimum wage. MK 's brilliant work in this genre is often overshadowed by the fame of her male collaborators.

Milestones

4 December 1861

MK was born this year as Emma Goldworth Kendall at Bridlington in Yorkshire, the youngest of four children.
Birch, Catherine Elizabeth. Evolutionary Feminism in Late-Victorian Women’s Poetry: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden and May Kendall. University of Birmingham.
56-7
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 240. Gale Research.
118

1885

MK 's first full-length published work was a short novel, in part a fairy tale: That Very Mab, written in collaboration with Andrew Lang , the classical scholar and folklore collector.
Birch, Catherine Elizabeth. Evolutionary Feminism in Late-Victorian Women’s Poetry: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden and May Kendall. University of Birmingham.
56

By mid-November 1887

MK 's first book of poetry, Dreams to Sell, appeared. It is most notable for its section on Science and the way its evolutionary theory challenges naturalist notions of women's inferiority.
Critics who forcefully make the connection between evolution and gender in MK 's work are John Holmes in The Lay of the Trilobite: Rereading May Kendall, 2010, and Catherine Birch in her PhD thesis, Evolutionary Feminism in Late-Victorian Women's Poetry: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden and May Kendall, 2011.
Birch, Catherine Elizabeth. Evolutionary Feminism in Late-Victorian Women’s Poetry: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden and May Kendall. University of Birmingham.
Holmes, John. “‘The Lay of the Trilobite’: Rereading May Kendall”. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Vol.
11
.
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 240. Gale Research.
119

February 1931

The Stone Fiddler: A Garden Statue was MK 's last poem published in the Cornhill Magazine.
Kendall, May. “The Stone Fiddler: A Garden Statue”. Cornhill Magazine, Vol.
70
, p. 231.
231

11 October 1943

MK died in poverty at an institution in York; her death certificate gives the cause as Senile, that is suffering from dementia.
Birch, Catherine Elizabeth. Evolutionary Feminism in Late-Victorian Women’s Poetry: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden and May Kendall. University of Birmingham.
64

Biography

Birth

4 December 1861

MK was born this year as Emma Goldworth Kendall at Bridlington in Yorkshire, the youngest of four children.
Birch, Catherine Elizabeth. Evolutionary Feminism in Late-Victorian Women’s Poetry: Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden and May Kendall. University of Birmingham.
56-7
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 240. Gale Research.
118

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