The Transatlantic Inheritance of Alice Meynell

Abstract

It is to Alice Meynell that Coventry Patmore gives the only manuscript of The Angel in the House (1854–62) in 1893. But Meynell's actual house at the time, 47 Palace Court, was built with money from Jamaican sugar and rum plantations owned by her father, the legitimated descendant of plantation owners and enslaved persons. In this article, I seek to reconnect Meynell's work to its Jamaican context, building on the work of scholars—from Adela Pinch to Yopie Prins—who have tracked the influence of her prosody, her theology, and her sense of community.

To remember Alice Meynell (1847–1922) within her Caribbean context is to return to the legacies of slavery at the heart of Victorian and Edwardian literature.¹ For example, it was to Meynell that Coventry Patmore in 1893 gave the only manuscript of The Angel in the House (1854–62).² But Meynell's actual house at that time, 47 Palace Court, was built with money from Jamaican sugar and rum plantations owned by her father, himself the legitimated descendant of plantation owners and enslaved persons.³ Here is the genealogy, cross-referenced with quotations from a related Meynell poem discussed below, “To O—, of Her Dark Eyes”:

It is unsurprising that Alice was to write appreciations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, including the then-standard article on her life and work in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. They were third cousins. Elizabeth Barrett's great-grandfather, Edward Barrett of Cinnamon Hill, has a little sister, Amelia. Amelia Barrett marries Thomas Pepper Thompson.⁴ They were to have no children. Thomas fathers a son with a now unknown woman and takes that son to Jamaica. That son, James, leaves three Jamaican children—two daughters and a son—by Mary Edwards.⁵ James and Mary never marry. It is arresting to see the Trelawney baptismal record of their first child, Amelia, in which the clerk has accidentally given Mary a married name and then has had to emend it: “Mary Thompson Edwards.”⁶

Mary Edwards, the Creole grandmother of our poet, was not “white” under the law. In the Jamaican system, “white” was a legal status that meant you could not be enslaved. Children of various degrees of Black African ancestry could be declared by the assembly to be legally white, and some few who could afford to get their children thus classified did so. There evolved a set form of language—particular phrases and tropes—for petitioning the government for this. Brooke Newman's Dark Inheritance includes verbatim examples of such petitions.⁷ But Mary Edwards did not have to petition the government. She was able to be listed as “free mustee” in the baptismal records of her Thompson son. That term meant three things: she was in the last degree of those who were still enslaveable, but she was herself unenslaved, and her boy could be “white” under the law.

Mary Edwards had had other children with James Thompson: two girls, Amelia Thompson (namesake of her grandmother, Amelia Barrett) and Elizabeth Dorothy Thompson.⁸ We have all three children's baptismal records: “Amelia Thompson Daughter of James Thompson and Mary Thompson Edwards baptized 1^st June 1808 aged 8 months.”⁹ Her sister is a year younger: “Elizabeth Dorothy Thompson mustee daughter of James Thompson Esqre. of Vale Royal Estate and Mary Edwards a Free Quadroon woman born 1808 baptised 25^th April 1810.”¹⁰ And in the 1811 entry for the third child, two decisive things come to light: it's a boy, and his father is dead: “Thomas James Thompson Illegitimate Son of Mary Edwards free mustee and the late James Thompson Esq of Vale Royal Estate born July 9^th 1811 and baptized 19^th Dec 1811.”

As the mother of the only surviving (albeit illegitimate) heir, Mary's legal status has to be clear. Left undocumented, then coded as “quadroon,” her status gets rehabilitated for dynastic purposes, transformed into “mustee” so that her son can inherit. Under the notorious Devises Act of 1761, only repealed later in 1813, Jamaican law prohibited nonwhite persons from inheriting property.¹¹ The Devises Act was still the law of the land in 1811, and, for all anybody knew, it would never be repealed. By the time of Thomas James's christening, at the age of five months, his father is no longer living.¹² His mother Mary's legal status has to be massaged so that the boy can be “white” and legally inherit.¹³ Thomas Pepper Thompson returns to Liverpool with Mary Edwards and the boy: “Mary Edwards late of Rio Bueno but now residing with me” is left £100 per annum (payable quarterly) in the dynast's will, signed April 15, 1819 and proved December 31, 1823.¹⁴

The three Thompson children of Mary Edwards are recognized by their grandfather in the will. The boy, Thomas James—the legitimated descendant of enslaved African ancestors and father to Alice Meynell—is left £40,000 (call it $5 million in today's money), along with several properties in England. Thomas Pepper's business partner and executor, Adam Cliff, will continue running the four Thompson plantations—Vale Royal, Maria Bueno, Lancaster, and Mount Carmel. (They're all in Trelawney Parish, except for Mount Carmel, which is in St. Ann Parish.)

Under the 1833 Emancipation Act, the government reimburses the Thompson estate for 596 enslaved persons: £11,233 17s 2d.¹⁵ As heir, Thomas James Thompson has a claim too on even this additional inheritance, and is suing Adam Cliff in Chancery when a friend—Charles Dickens, later to become the great chronicler of Chancery—introduces him to Christiana Weller.¹⁶ This concert pianist (whom Dickens might well have married himself, had he not been married to Kate) would go on to marry Thompson and be the mother of Alice Christiana Thompson Meynell.

Robert Browning, upon meeting Alice's husband, Wilfrid, says: “Our wives are kinswomen, I believe.”¹⁷ And that's surely the most precise way to put it. “Kinswomen” here means third cousins, an ocean removed.

In the pages that follow, I seek to read through the Jamaican inheritance that Meynell would negotiate throughout her work. Few writers can have been more hardworking, yet Meynell's formative experiences—from childhood memories in Italy to the building of her own family's house in Palace Court—were literally funded by a Jamaican inheritance. That inheritance, at the same time, is more than financial, as her Jamaican father and his Jamaican mother appear and reappear in powerful ways in Meynell's poetry and prose.

In looking at Meynell's genealogy, I'm extending a topic that has long been a focus of the major scholarship: maternity.¹⁸ Yopie Prins puts her finger on the pulse of the bodily rhythms deployed in Meynell's poetics.¹⁹ Cristina Richieri Griffin—building on the foundational work of Prins as well as that of Angela Leighton and Maria Frawley—shows how the reverse is also true: if Meynell uses rhythms of the body in her verse, she also uses her verse to value prenatal care in ways that her era's obstetrics had not done.²⁰ But what does it mean, then, to study the poetics of Meynell in the context of Jamaican inheritance, of what is passed down through one's family line? We would rightly expect a poet to change her rhymes and alliterations, her assonances and caesurae, if she wants to teach us how her family line was enjambed across the Atlantic.²¹ One of Meynell's last major works, the chapbook A Father of Women (1917), focuses on this family in detail, as we shall see.

Likewise, critics have drawn our attention, if not to genealogy, certainly to the marriage theme in and around Meynell's works. Adela Pinch shows Meynell's circle—especially Patmore—negotiating complex theological questions through the idea of marriage. Patmore liked to say, “All knowledge is nuptial knowledge.” Meynell thought so, too.²² But what does it mean to read Meynell's work on marriage—mystical and otherwise—if, for Meynell, marriage was always also a question of race, inheritance, freedom, legitimacy? Nuptial knowledge had been a problem under the antimiscegenation laws of Meynell's ancestral Jamaica: the mixed nonmarriages of which Meynell was a product had to be painstakingly documented, with degrees of sanguinity always recorded and, simultaneously, euphemized, rendered ambiguously “Creole,” hushed up.

Meynell negotiates these concerns in the 1917 poem to her daughter Olivia, “To O—, of Her Dark Eyes.” I'll spend some time with this poem and the legacies for which it serves as a hyperlink. But in analyzing Meynell's poetics, I want to contribute to the larger, ongoing project of recontextualizing Jamaica and the Caribbean as central rather than peripheral in Victorian studies and British literature. Nor should this work come at the expense of formal analysis that other disciplines can't do. Meynell's poetics, and her contemporaries’, demand such attention: Meynell is nowhere more attentive to questions of identity than in her prosody.²³

For instance, Prins shows that Meynell, with a sustained “meditation on ‘the rhythmic pangs’ of maternity … turns giving birth into a trope for poetic creation.”²⁴ Those who have spent time with Meynell's work will agree. The death of Meynell's infant son Vivian was the immediate cause of her 1890 return to poetry, after a long hiatus following her 1877 marriage.²⁵ Meynell by the turn of the century was particularly known for her writings on children and child-rearing and had become a much-cited voice in what was called “child-study,” the expertise complex being generated as pediatrics and education (and eugenics) went about constituting themselves as disciplines.²⁶ Linda Austin points out that, just as the “convergence of prevailing views of childhood and materialist theory [was] crucial to the work of Alice Meynell,” Meynell in turn was “the leading observer of children and child development in the daily and weekly newspapers of the 1890s. Indeed, if Wordsworth was for Victorians the chief Romantic chronicler of memory, the self and childhood, Meynell was his successor.”²⁷

But Meynell's work in this direction, chronicling her children, was also a way for her to give a chronicle to unchronicled Jamaican ancestors. “To O—, of Her Dark Eyes,” in other words, isn't an isolated work, nor is its larger volume, A Father of Women. Instead, late work like this reminds us that Meynell's larger project of building an archive of humanistic child-study literature was, throughout her career, about honoring with that archive her own transatlantic family. The creative prosody that is always, for Meynell, a procreative pang— the “Rhythm of Life”—bespeaks, for her, a Jamaican inheritance. If the work of writing and the work of child-rearing were for her intertwined, it is not least because both continued the same legacy.

Here, then, I seek to follow Austin, Griffin, Pinch, Prins, and others,²⁸ but to include Meynell's transatlantic inheritance. In engaging with Meynell, I'm taking up a literally kindred project of Tricia Lootens's Political Poetess, with its rereading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her West Indian context. And it's worth repeating Lootens's pointed line: “Who made the Poetess white? No one; not ever.”²⁹

1. Creole

In February 1915, E. M. Forster comes to stay for a few days at the family home of Alice Meynell—not out of respect for her work but only to see a couple of her tenants, D. H. and Frieda Lawrence. Forster views Meynell herself—and her progeny—as feeble, superstitious people lacking any real distinction: “a curious, ineffective race, I believe with creole blood in them: all catholicism [sic] and culture.”³⁰ Forster's coding and decoding do a lot of work here, all inaccurate: Meynell does have Jamaican family (though not Catholic) on her father's side. The (to Forster) distasteful devotion comes (as is well known) from the other side: Alice's English mother joins the Roman Catholic Church, a decision followed by her then twenty-year-old daughter in 1868.³¹ But for Forster the creole and catholicism go alliteratively together (alongside “culture,” that middlebrow refinement which makes the Meynells sound out-of-touch with whatever might have been worth knowing of Catholic or Creole tradition; lowercase letters likewise help with the takedown).

It's good to remember that Alice Meynell, then nearing seventy, was being read this way—her body, her thought—because it reminds us what it meant for her to speak to her Jamaican Creole ancestry, what her Thompson family had themselves encoded one hundred years before. Not only the house in Palace Court had been bought with the proceeds (invested at compound interest in the funds) from the labor of enslaved persons on Jamaican sugar and rum plantations. The same source had also provided the education that first opened up the possibility of literary life for Alice—so that even the (by all accounts) charming life at Greatham's eighty acres shares this backstory.

Amid these whispers, late in life, in the second decade of the twentieth century, Meynell publishes the poem on the 1890 birth of her daughter Olivia, “To O—, of Her Dark Eyes.”³² Using seventeenth-century devices such as paradoxical conceit—Olivia's eyes are dark luminaries—Meynell formally evokes the era when families like hers and Elizabeth Barrett's first made their fortunes in the West Indies.³³ At the same time, Meynell creates a new work that reinscribes her identity as her Jamaican father's daughter—and situates her own daughter within generations of women like Meynell's Jamaican grandmother, Mary. In the pages that follow, I look in detail at the poem for Olivia, and then, in a subsequent section, I sound out Olivia's middle name, Mary, a name whose resonances reveal the shape and the depths of Meynell's thinking about family and religion.

It's best if we start with the entire poem:

TO O——, OF HER DARK EYES

Across what calm of tropic seas,

’Neath alien clusters of the nights,

Looked, in the past, such eyes as these?

Long-quenched, relumed, ancestral lights!

The generations fostered them;

And steadfast Nature, secretwise—

Thou seedling child of that old stem—

Kindled anew thy dark-bright eyes.

Was it a century or two

This lovely darkness rose and set,

Occluded by grey eyes and blue,

And Nature feigning to forget?

Some grandam gave a hint of it—

So cherished was it in thy race,

So fine a treasure to transmit

In its perfection to thy face.

Some father to some mother's breast

Entrusted it, unknowing. Time

Implied, or made it manifest,

Bequest of a forgotten clime.

Hereditary eyes! But this

Is single, singular, apart:—

New-made thy love, new-made thy kiss,

New-made thy errand to my heart.

Formally, the poem's post-Saxon alliterative verse situates us in the British Isles: cross/calm, ’neath/nights, looked/long/relumed/lights.³⁴ But the verse then revolves this Englishness around a master conceit of eclipse, Meynell's African ancestry getting “occluded by grey eyes and blue.”³⁵ Another, overdetermined conceit—of inheritance, the last will and testament, bequests—will raise the legality of being and conveying property, the colonial conceit par excellence. Meynell inverts what was a civil disability under apartheid and reframes her African ancestry as an inheritance that must be preserved:

So fine a treasure to transmit

In its perfection to thy face.

“Thy” is doing several things here: it is an archaism—putting us in an earlier century of transatlantic traffic that produced Alice and her family. It's also a lexical item doing its ordinary work, naming the second person more affectionately than “you/your” can.³⁶ Third, it's functioning phonetically, the voiced dental fricative that turns out to be embedded in “father” and “mother” in the next line. That next line begins a spectacular penultimate stanza that, through virtuosic internal rhymes, makes us attend to that which is passed down within:

Some father to some mother's breast

Entrusted it, unknowing. Time

Implied or made it manifest,

Bequest of a forgotten clime.

Hereditary eyes!

“Entrust” doesn't rhyme with “breast,” or “manifest,” or “bequest,” but it keeps the rhyme alive—hands it down, held, like a property in trust, right through that second line, right through a skipped generation where an otherwise manifest trait is just implied.

“Implied” doesn't rhyme with “time” or “clime,” but its assonance implies a rhyme—and a rhyme is implicated in the folds of its initial letters, before the ply: “im.” Different, this time, “im,” not “I'm”—im, plying a line, and eyeing a rhyme, across Atlantic waters. Hereditary I’s. Eyes like the eyes in your head, carried down the generations—but also the vowel, the I, the I’s, carried down, through the poet's lines—the poet's generations.

A seventeenth-century joke, right? Wit, in the style of Crashaw—Richard Crashaw, the poet of the eyes, which is to say, of oceans. Crashaw, in a famous textbook anthology example of baroque poetics, writes of Mary Magdalene's eyes that they are “portable and compendious oceans.” (Another Meynell daughter, the sister of Olivia, is Madeline, named for Crashaw's saint.) Meynell had written extensively on Crashaw—a fellow English Catholic convert poet and a role model of hers. In a textbook anthology edited by Alice Meynell, The Flower of the Mind, Crashaw is featured, getting half the number of pages of the entire eighteenth century (an era that Meynell seems to have regarded as a generation that poetry skipped).³⁷ In this same anthology, a few dozen pages before Crashaw, we find George Herbert's “Love”: “quick-eyed Love” famously asking, “Who made the eyes but I?”³⁸ In the poem “To O—, of Her Dark Eyes,” Meynell's poetics point us to the seventeenth century of the extended family's transatlantic meeting in Jamaica. This poem is the central poem—eighth out of sixteen—in the important 1917 chapbook A Father of Women. The last word of the poem, “heart,” is, in this sense, the heart of the chapbook, making the entire volume a kind of baroque figure-poem, with its heart in the middle. And it is, predictably, a book about blood—the blood that that heart beats, beating with the rhythm of life.

“Thy father was transfused into thy blood” is the epigraph at the beginning of the book's first, dedicatory poem, “A Father of Women.” The transfusion line is from another seventeenth-century Catholic convert, John Dryden—and it names a seventeenth-century procedure, a “late Anatomical invention experimented by the Royal Society,” as a 1678 dictionary has it (OED). In the source poem, Dryden's ode “To Mrs. Anne Killigrew,” we find a circulating complex of baroque blood conceits that we recognize from Meynell:

Thy father was transfused into thy blood.

So wert thou born into the tuneful strain

(an early, rich, and inexhausted vein).

A strain is a melody but also a line of descent. Descanting on descent, Dryden and Meynell both know a vein is an ore deposit—a commodity, like Jamaican sugar or rum—as well as a part of the circulatory system of the blood (first described by Harvey in the seventeenth century). Dryden hypothesizes that the great artist Anne Killigrew may have gotten her gifts from her father, that her talent is in the blood.³⁹ Meynell describes her own family in the same vein, a transatlantic transfusion with her father at the heart of the work.

It is a poem—and a book—where Meynell is not only negotiating her father's illegitimacy but rethinking how her children, like Olivia and Madeline, take up the strain of a Jamaican ancestry that, until now, has inhabited the archive only via the records of legitimation:

Come then,

Fathers of women with your honor in trust;

Approve, accept, know them daughters of men,

Now that your sons are dust.⁴⁰

Meynell's father was only “known” by his own namesake grandfather—only acknowledged as a member of his own family—via a legitimation that included the 1823 proving of a trust.⁴¹ Meynell and her sister are now the beneficiaries of that trust. It is a war poem, to be sure, but in her poetry and in her other writing on descent and on children, Alice Meynell is erecting her own family, her own children, into a new archive where their legitimacy no longer rests on British imperial regimes of approval, acceptance, acknowledgment.

Through both her baroque theology and her seventeenth-century poetics, Meynell focuses us on the era when English families colonized Jamaica, families like the family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and hers.

2. Mary

In A Father of Women, Alice Meynell is thinking through what it means to be her Jamaican father's daughter. One thing it means is to be Mary Edwards’ granddaughter. It is her name that Meynell has passed down to all four of her own daughters: first Monica Mary, then Madeline Mary, then Viola Mary, and finally Olivia Mary.⁴² The name is of course always also the name of a devotional namesake, Mary, the Mother of Jesus (to take the title of one of Meynell's major late prose works). I want to suggest that Meynell's writings make more sense if we see these figures together rather than trying to separate them: mother Mary and grandmother Mary Edwards are not the same, but they're not separate in Meynell's imagination. Meynell argues at length in Mary, the Mother of Jesus that various separate human virtues—elements of character, of subjectivity—can and should reflect aspects of Mary.⁴³ Students of Meynell know that her Marian devotion informs her daily labor: not only her way of writing but her suffrage activism and her well-documented toil for Catholic periodicals (writing, editing, translating, etc.).⁴⁴ In working toward a Christian world, as she understood it, Meynell was also perhaps seeking a kind of community that would not be ethnonationalist. Certainly both Marys bore children considered illegitimate under the prevailing empire and were not married to the fathers of their children.

One of Meynell's most famous essays, “The Colour of Life” (1896), features a strikingly theological description of Mary and child. A boy—like hundreds of others in what was then a common scene in London—has gotten off work and gone to Hyde Park to swim in the Serpentine. But then this happens: “Clothed now with the sun, he is crowned by-and-by with twelve stars as he goes to bathe, and the reflection of an early moon is under his feet.” Where a reader might have expected the boy to be described, instead the Virgin Mary seems to appear. The language is scripture: “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelations 12:1). Has the boy appeared as the Virgin Mary? Or is he the Child in her arms? The generations are blended together, in a pattern that we already know from A Father of Women.

To be sure, the geography of “The Colour of Life”—one that explicitly charts skin color—does not extend to Mary's Jamaica or indeed beyond Italy: “Under Sicilian skies,” we are told, the color of life pulsing through the skin can be “deeper than old ivory.” But that other island, Jamaica, with the estates that funded Meynell's childhood trips to Italy, is not in evidence here. The boy's English skin is, we are told, “delicately flushed as the paler wild roses,” and the “colour of life” is the color of red blood seen through that pale rose. The text is anxious that blood not get out:

Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But the true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence, or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the colour of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. . . . The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses.⁴⁵

In “To O—,” Meynell is doing some breaking open, editing, and publishing. And “To O—" reminds us that the pulse of Alice Meynell was also—importantly, to her—transfused with her father's blood. What was read as her whiteness at the heart of Victorian and Edwardian England was always also Jamaican and Creole.

But that's not on display in “The Colour of Life.” Riffing on Luke 19:20, Meynell says of the red of blood, “It is one of the things the value of which is secrecy, one of the talents that are to be hidden in a napkin.” “The Colour of Life,” in other words, isn't just about a secret. “The Colour of Life” has a secret.⁴⁶ And to hear that secret is to realize not just that the white skin of the London establishment is always perhaps Jamaican. It's also to remember that much of the Victorian establishment has literally been funded by the government buyout of slaveholders in the 1830s, taking wealth (or illth) that had been tied up in sugarcane and human beings and releasing it as cash to families in London and Liverpool. “Secretwise” rhymes with Olivia's “eyes.”

Still, even when she isn't telling the secret, Meynell finds resources in the Marian tradition for more capacious understandings of legitimacy and family. Regimes of sanction prevented Mary Edwards from marrying and policed the legitimate and illegitimate births in Alice's family. So it is with such nativities in view that Meynell turns to the Nativity. Meynell, the mother of Olivia Mary and the granddaughter of Mary Edwards, writes about legitimacy, family, and inheritance by writing about that other Mary.

Mary brings us back, also, to the Patmore in the house. Patmore and Meynell were of course major influences on each other, and not least in their shared interest in Marian devotion. If Amanda Paxton contextualizes Patmore's thought within the broad and deep tradition of nineteenth-century bridal mysticism—which in turn drew from the Victorian recovery of medieval and baroque textual traditions—Meynell was writing back to that tradition, influenced by her kinswomen. In a typical passage in Mary, the Mother of Jesus, Meynell argues, citing Patmore, that Marian liturgy reinforces women's rights because it influences how richly women characters are written in secular poetry and drama.⁴⁷ Meynell in several places specifically takes up Patmore's bridal mysticism in detail. Her substantial corpus of devotional writing hinges on the life of the Virgin Mother, not least as bride of Christ. And if we revisit Meynell's theological work from across the Atlantic, where Mary's Jamaica is, Meynell's theology takes on new resonance in the context of that inheritance.

It will illustrate the point to look at two examples of Marian tropes important to Meynell: read as Spouse of her Son, Mary cannot be accounted for neatly in the ledgers of inheritance. And read as the “dark but fair” bride of the Song of Songs, Mary is not straightforwardly white.

In her 1901 introduction to Venturi's Madonna, Meynell goes out of her way to praise specific Victorian and fin de siècle poems on Mary the Spouse of Christ.⁴⁸ The key nuptial verse expanded on in these works is “his left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me” (Song of Songs 2:6). Meynell quotes what she considers exemplary verses from Dante Gabriel Rossetti that, addressing Mary as the bride with language from the Song of Songs, use bridegroom terms to describe her Child:

What human thought can apprehend

That mystery of motherhood

When thy Beloved at length renewed

The sweet communion severèd—

His left hand underneath thine head

And His right hand embracing thee?⁴⁹

In Meynell's text, these lines from Rossetti's “Ave” follow a longer quote from Francis Thompson's “Assumpta Maria.” Here the Virgin speaks in the first person:

Lo! He standeth, Spouse and Brother . . .

To my Bread myself the bread is,

And my Wine doth drink me: see,

His left hand beneath my head is,

His right hand embraceth me!⁵⁰

Meynell's recurring interest in this scene of the bridegroom/Christ child nursing takes on a particular significance in the context of her own transatlantic family, including the antimiscegenation laws that had governed them as recently as the birth of Meynell's father to his mother, Mary, in Trelawney. In the icon of the Eucharist at the breast, an originary transfusion—flowing not one way but in a circuit, like an ocean current, pouring across generations and genders—the mother provides for her child, and the child nourishes its nurse. Meynell's father is transfused into her blood. And so is her daughter.⁵¹ All three participate in an unquantifiable mixing, human, transcendent, immeasurable, Marian.⁵² Meynell points us to Patmore's “The Child's Purchase,” in which the poet, all in the same breath, prays to Mary as “Spouse blissful, Daughter, Sister, milk-sweet Mother.”⁵³ Motherhood and marriage here get swept up in the tide of an overwhelming, circuitous litany that mystically fuses relationships that we (and the law) might have thought distinct.

In Mary, the Mother, Meynell directs us to the poem “Aishah Shechinah” by the priest and poet Robert Hawker.⁵⁴ The mystical title is at once instinct with meaning and pure, nonlexical, incantatory sound. Like a salutation from a litany, its breathy fricatives and diphthongs fill the flesh of the mouth and come out in words that signify something like “unfallen mother of God.”⁵⁵ Mary's beating heart is the intersection of the earthly and celestial, and in the communion of the child/spouse nursing is, for Meynell as for Hawker, the redemption of the world: “The Zone where two glad worlds forever meet / Beneath that bosom ran” (ll. 21–22). In his final two lines, Hawker reveals the full scene, not as a grammatical sentence, not as a proposition to be comprehended, but as a freestanding icon to be felt: “Her God upon her lap, the Virgin Bride, / Her awful Child, her Son!” (ll. 21–22, 27–28).⁵⁶ This is why the poem could be included in the Oxford Book of Mystical Verse (1917).⁵⁷ It offers not a lesson to be read but an identity to be inhabited.

In the Song of Songs, the bride begins by saying, “I am dark but fair” (Song of Songs 1:5). In Meynell's language: “I am dark but fair, / Black but fair.” She quotes it in her poem “The Moon to the Sun,” which is subtitled, “The Poet Sings to Her Poet.” As Emily Harrington reminds us, here “the sun represents the poets of the past while the moon represents the poets of the future”—and also the poet of the present. Meynell is speaking very much in the first-person singular, too. She makes a point of quoting, on more than one occasion, Francis Thompson's salute to Mary the dark and fair: both in the Venturi introduction and in Mary, the Mother, Meynell gives Thompson's lines, with their astonishing compression of Marian tropes, including the nursing mother and the bride both dark and fair:

See in highest heaven pavilioned

Now the maiden Heaven rest,

The many-breasted sky out-millioned

By the splendours of her vest.

Lo, the Ark this holy tide is

The un-handmade Temple's guest,

And the dark Egyptian bride is

Whitely to the Spouse-heart pressed.⁵⁸

This, too, is, in the words of Olivia's poem, “some mother's breast.” It's Mary's.

Nor is it accidental that Meynell herself enjoys anthologizing, quoting, and mixing these different writers in a method of collage or pastiche. In Mary, the Mother and the introduction to Madonna, Meynell adopts exactly this compositional method, making her text out of a tissue of citations from poets and writers whose own works are themselves highly allusive. In so doing, Meynell creates a particular subjectivity, in which the readerly “I” is caught up in becoming other—becoming Mary, becoming mother, becoming bride. This technique, borrowing from medieval methods of textual composition, has the effect of bending time, fusing the present and past, across generations.⁵⁹ The granddaughter of Mary, Meynell is at pains to build a world outside the models of generational descent like those that underwrote her ancestral Jamaica's apartheid.

In closing, I would like to suggest that remembering Meynell's Jamaican family nuances our readings of her other texts, too. At the time of A Father of Women in 1917, Meynell is a grandmother herself. Olivia, for instance, her youngest daughter, is twenty-seven, married, and the mother of a child of her own. “To O—” is a prequel, written as though it were still the 1890s, as though Olivia were “new-made,” and as though all of Meynell's famous work on children and child-rearing is yet to come. In this regard, “To O—” and its book invite us to revisit, reread, and rethink all of Meynell's earlier writing on childhood in light of her ancestral lights and grandmother Mary. For instance, in Meynell's essay “The Child of Tumult” (1897), we see Olivia keeping tabs on her younger brother Francis. Francis (at six years old, not yet knighted) is the title character. But calm even at seven—“across what calm of tropic seas”—Olivia steals the show, “observ[ing] the boy's brief frenzies as a citizen observes the climate. Her equanimity has never been overset.” Urbane in the cloudburst, Olivia is the reader, and Francis just a text.⁶⁰

Or we turn to the poems, and we find “To O—” to be a pendent to “The Modern Mother” (1900). A well-known poem, noticed by Angela Leighton and others, “The Modern Mother” was inspired by a kiss from Francis, nine years old in 1900 (a year younger than Olivia). Put the last lines of “To O—” before the first lines of “The Modern Mother”:

But this

Is single, singular, apart:—

New-made thy love, new-made thy kiss,

New-made thy errand to my heart. (“To O—,” ll. 21–24)

Oh what a kiss

With filial passion overcharged is this! (“The Modern Mother,” ll. 1–2)

These two stanzas kiss. And by the time we get to the last verses of “The Modern Mother,” we are not light-years away from Olivia's rekindled celestial lights: “O filial light / Strong in these childish eyes, these new, these bright / Intelligible stars” (“The Modern Mother,” ll. 16–18).

My hope would be that as work on Meynell and her contemporaries continues, we can combine the historical analysis enabled by the UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership project and the Jamaican parish records, alongside the kind of formal analysis that our discipline knows how to do with poetry and prose.⁶¹ The mastery of words that Meynell is known for—and all metaphors of mastery handed down through English literary criticism—are implicated in a history of slavery and its bequests.⁶²