Ménie Muriel Dowie

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Standard Name: Dowie, Ménie Muriel
Birth Name: Mary Muriel Dowie
Nickname: Ménie
Indexed Name: Menie Muriel Dowie
Pseudonym: Princess Top-Storey
Pseudonym: Judith Vermont
Pseudonym: M. Nugent
Married Name: Ménie Muriel Norman
Married Name: Ménie Muriel FitzGerald
Ménie Muriel Dowie , largely forgotten travel and adventure writer, essayist and new woman novelist, stormed into the literary scene of the 1890s with her enormously popular first book, A Girl in the Karpathians, which describes her solitary journey through easternEurope. By then she was a published poet, essayist, and writer of short stories, and had earned accolades for her speeches. During the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, she wrote across a variety of genres, becoming both a columnist and editor, and continuing to publish short stories, most notably in The Yellow Book, before her abrupt departure from the literary scene in 1903. Her characteristic tone is ironic, satirical, and often playfully ambiguous.
Sketch of Ménie Muriel Dowie, by M. Fletcher, 1891. She stands in a jaunty pose, head tilted, left hand on hip, and right hand holding her tam-o'-shanter-style cap. Her "Karpathian Costume" (as the caption below has it) also includes breeches, an open jacket over a laced waistcoat over a shirt, and gaiters stretching from her thighs to cover part of her shoes.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Kate Clanchy
While the family was in Edinburgh, KC 's mother, Joan Clanchy , was the Headmistress of St George's School for Girls (which numbers Ménie Muriel Dowie among its distinguished former students).
Scott, Jane. “By Virtue Of An Explosive Arts Debut”. The Herald, 30 Dec. 1996.
When KC 's...
Family and Intimate relationships Rosamond Lehmann
Victorian author Ménie Muriel Dowie , aunt of Amelia and Liza, was RL 's first cousin once removed. Lehmann apparently saw her as a magnetic, quintessentially untruthful person—a self-deceiver of enormous proportions,—though with...
Textual Features Rosamond Lehmann
Sibyl has been often linked to RL 's cousin the writer Ménie Muriel Dowie . Lehmann herself said that five different real life models had been suggested, all ludicrously wide of the mark. But in...

Timeline

1876: A group of Scotswomen who had been frustrated...

Building item

1876

A group of Scotswomen who had been frustrated in their desire to attend university founded St George's Hall Classes, to offer teaching to university level, either by attendance or by correspondence courses. Students at...

Texts

Dowie, Ménie Muriel. A Girl in the Karpathians. Fifth Edition, George Philip & Son, 1892.
Dowie, Ménie Muriel. Gallia. Editor Small, Helen, J. M. Dent, 1995.
Dowie, Ménie Muriel. Love and his Mask. William Heineman, 1901.
Dowie, Ménie Muriel. Some Whims of Fate. John Lane, 1896.
Dowie, Ménie Muriel. The Crook of the Bough. Methuen & Co., 1898.
Dowie, Ménie Muriel. “The Thrall Song”. Pall Mall Magazine, Vol.
30
, No. 123, p. 393.
Dowie, Ménie Muriel. Things about our Neighbourhood. Grant Richards, 1903.
Dowie, Ménie Muriel. “Wladislaw’s Advent”. The Yellow Book, Vol.
iv
, No. I, E. Mathews & J. Lane, 1895, pp. 90-115.
Dowie, Ménie Muriel, editor. Women Adventurers. T. Fisher Unwin, 1893.