Bessie Rayner Parkes

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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.
Sepia toned photograph of Bessie Rayner Parkes, seated on an upholstered chair, with an ornate table next to her. Her hands are clasped in her lap, she is wearing a dark dress with a voluminous skirt and long sleeves. She has dark, wavy, shoulder-length hair.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Mary Bosanquet Fletcher
Three biographies appeared in the years following MBF 's death, and went through many re-issues. Local memory of her remained strong (as instanced by the Memorial Chapel at Leyton Wesleyan church), and so did international...
Literary responses Anna Mary Howitt
Mary Howitt called the Boadicea picture very fine, truly sublime.
qtd. in
Lee, Amice. Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt. Oxford University Press, 1955.
216
Ruskin had demanded in a letter: What do you know about Boadicea? Leave such subjects alone and paint me a pheasant's wing.
qtd. in
Lee, Amice. Laurels & Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt. Oxford University Press, 1955.
217
Bessie Rayner Parkes
Literary responses Adelaide Procter
This poem was highly regarded by Bessie Rayner Parkes . Critic Gill Gregory reads it as a powerful critique of Keble 's authoritative voice and an unsettling of key Tractarian tenets, stemming from AP 's revisionary poetics.
Gregory, Gill. The Life and Work of Adelaide Proctor. Ashgate, 1998.
85
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...
Literary responses Adelaide Procter
The Athenæum carried a brief review by H. F. Chorley congratulating the journal (and in effect himself) on having early recognised that AP belonged to the Golden Book of English poetesses.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1989 (1865): 799
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
A...
Material Conditions of Writing Elizabeth Charles
EC was a diligent researcher and a great reader of historical biography (though not of novels). While she was working on this book, Bessie Rayner Belloc (formerly Parkes)went to great trouble to obtain every...
Occupation Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
At about this time she painted her finest water-colour, a large painting of the plain of Blidah in Algiers, showing honey-coloured sand, sparsely covered with grey olive trees, blue cacti, and alfa [sic]...
Occupation Matilda Hays
As well as co-founding and co-editing the English Woman's Journal with Bessie Rayner Parkes (between 1857 and 1862),
Rendall, Jane. “A Moral Engine? Feminism, Liberalism and the English Womans JournalEqual or Different: Womens Politics 1800-1914, edited by Jane Rendall, Basil Blackwell, 1987, pp. 112-38.
116, 119-20
MH also worked devotedly for the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women .
Merrill, Lisa. When Romeo Was a Woman. University of Michigan Press, 1999.
185
Occupation Matilda Hays
By 1861 MH was a partner in the Victoria Press . Her involvement, however, was short-lived, and she never invested any funds in the press.
Stone, James S. Emily Faithfull: Victorian Champion of Women’s Rights. P. D. Meany, 1994.
52, 238n10
By 1860 rumours were apparently circulating about her...
Occupation Mary Bosanquet Fletcher
From the age of seventeen Mary Bosanquet had admired the women whom the primitive church made deaconesses because of their ministering work among the poor, and she resolved to model herself on their practical ministry...
Occupation John Stuart Mill
JSM served as independent MP for Westminster from 1865 to 1868.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 5th ed., Oxford University Press, 1985.
Mill, John Stuart, and John Jacob Coss. Autobiography. Columbia University Press, 1924.
vii
The Concise Dictionary of National Biography: From Earliest Times to 1985. Oxford University Press, 1992, 3 vols.
His campaign for election was supported by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon , Bessie Rayner Parkes , Emily Davies , and Isa Craig .
Occupation Georgiana Fullerton
From the year 1855, GF 's devotion manifested itself in the charitable work for which she became known. On her own death thirty years after this, an obituarist in the Irish Monthly Magazine wrote that...
Other Life Event Emily Faithfull
Public interest was heightened by the Codringtons' social status and the sensational details of the case; the trial attracted a high degree of attention. Joseph Parkes passed on to Bessie Parkes the rumour that EF
Performance of text Harriet Beecher Stowe
Though HBS was internationally recognized for her written works she was not, unlike many other contemporary literary figures, a frequent lecturer. While Dickens , Samuel Clemens (who published as Mark Twain), Julia Ward Howe ...

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