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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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:

Formally, the poem's post-Saxon alliterative verse situates us in the British Isles: cross/calm, ’neath/nights, looked/long/relumed/lights.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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:

“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.Footnote 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:

“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).Footnote 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?”Footnote 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:

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.Footnote 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:

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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.).Footnote 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:

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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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:

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:

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.Footnote ⁵¹ All three participate in an unquantifiable mixing, human, transcendent, immeasurable, Marian.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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).Footnote ⁵⁶ This is why the poem could be included in the Oxford Book of Mystical Verse (1917).Footnote 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:

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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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”:

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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁶²