Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell's poetry and prose emerge here as work of rare delicacy, moral intelligence, and spiritual depth. The opening poems move from the beauty of summer England into the devastation of war, then inward to memory, longing, and the quiet arrival of thought, while the essays offer graceful, illuminating meditations that feel intimate without ever becoming preachy. Across both forms, Meynell's voice joins tenderness, faith, and social conscience in a style at once lyrical and exact. The poems trace a rich emotional and devotional arc: childhood remembered as a decisive source of vocation, love preserved through silence and distance, and the self shaped by hidden bonds that outlast time. Mothers, daughters, old age, and separation recur as haunting subjects, especially in the sorrowful monologues of grief, reunion, penance, and fragile renewal. Natural images of tides, hills, rain, birds, and flowers mirror the rhythms of feeling, while later poems broaden into explicitly Christian meditations on humility, poverty, redemption, and Christ's presence in the universe. Meynell's art continually links the personal soul to a larger, enduring order. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.