Bessie Rayner Parkes

16 June 1829 - 23 March 1925

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.

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Connections

Connections	Author name Sort descending	Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships	Marie Belloc Lowndes	Her English mother, who conducted her distinguished feminist writing career as Bessie Rayner Parkes , had married at thirty-eight (after converting to Catholicism about three years earlier). She met her husband while renting a chalet...
Intertextuality and Influence	Marie Belloc Lowndes	MBL decided in her teens that she wanted to be a writer. In 1887, with the encouragement of her mother (who was based in France) the two of them embarked on a winter in the...
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 .
Cultural formation	Adelaide Procter	AP may have converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism by this date; certainly she had by 1851. Sources conflict on the date of AP 's conversion, most of them dating it in 1851. Bessie Rayner Parkes
Travel	Adelaide Procter	The year-long visit in 1853-54 to her aunt Emily de Viry , a Catholic convert who was associated with the court at Turin, had a formative influence on AP 's life and religious beliefs...
Friends, Associates	Adelaide Procter	Other intimate feminist friends of AP 's adult years, in addition to Matilda Hays , were Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon . Procter was also a member of the Portfolio Society ...
death	Adelaide Procter	Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon wrote of her grief to Bessie Rayner Parkes : Adelaide's death is as a light gone from among us. Hirsch, Pam. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon 1827-1891: Feminist, Artist and Rebel. Chatto and Windus, 1998. 210 AP was buried in the Catholic St Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green...
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
Textual Production	Adelaide Procter	AP was involved with her reform-minded friends, including Bessie Rayner Parkes , Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon , and Matilda M. Hays , in helping to found the English Woman's Journal in 1858. She later contributed...
Textual Production	Adelaide Procter	According to Bessie Rayner Parkes , Procter had to be urged to publish the collection. The first series, which was issued at a price of 5 shillings by Bell and Daldy , had another edition...
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...
Reception	Adelaide Procter	By 1877 AP was said to be second only to Tennyson in the sales of her work, and, as Bessie Rayner Belloc said, her poems must have penetrated into every reading household in Great Britain...
Friends, Associates	Anne Thackeray Ritchie	ATR wrote to Charlotte Yonge a few years later, lamenting: oh! what a pity it is that we are all growing old who have had such happy happy times with one another. Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters. Editors Bloom, Abigail Burnham and John Maynard, Ohio State University Press, 1994. 242 She uttered...
Friends, Associates	Christina Rossetti	Around this time she became aware of her brother Dante Gabriel 's involvement with Elizabeth Siddal , although she and Siddal met only in 1854 and were never intimate friends. Close family friends of Christina...
Intertextuality and Influence	Christina Rossetti	In From the Antique, a dramatic lyric composed on 28 June 1854, Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. Editor Crump, Rebecca W., Louisiana State University Press, 1979–1990, 3 vols. 3: 449 CR 's speaker laments: It's a weary life, it is: she said:— Doubly blank in a woman's lot: I wish...

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