WRITER AND SUFFRAGIST, ALICE MEYNELL – Barnes

Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson, born in 1847 was an English writer, editor, critic, and suffragist, now remembered mainly as a poet.

She was born in Barnes, London, to Thomas James and Christiana Thompson. The family moved around England, Switzerland, and France, but she was brought up mostly in Italy, where a daughter of Thomas from his first marriage had settled. Her father was a friend of Charles Dickens.

After Alice, the entire Thompson family converted to the Roman Catholic Church and her writings migrated to subjects of religious matters. This eventually led her to the Catholic newspaper publisher and editor Wilfrid Meynell in 1876. A year later  she married him, and they settled in Kensington. They became proprietor and editor of The Pen, the Weekly Register, Merry England, and other magazines. Alice and Wilfrid had a family of eight children,

At the end of the nineteenth century, in conjunction with uprisings against the British (among them the Indians', the Zulus', the Boxer Rebellion, and the Muslim revolt lead by Muhammad Ahmed in the Sudan), many European scholars, writers, and artists, especially Catholics, began to question Europe’s colonial imperialism, and its attempt to rule the world. This led Alice, Wilfrid, Elizabeth, and others in their circle to speak out for the oppressed. Alice became a leading figure in the Women Writers' Suffrage League, which was founded by Cicely Hamilton and active 1908 to 1919.

Her prose essays were remarkable for fineness of culture and peculiar restraint of style. After a series of illnesses, including migraine and depression, she died in 1922, and is buried at Kensal Green Catholic Cemetery.