Sarah Doudney was born on 15 January 1841 in Portsea, Hampshire, at a time when the crowded naval and commercial communities around Portsmouth were expanding alongside Victorian Britain’s confidence in trade, empire, religion, and print. She was the daughter of a soap and candle manufacturer, and the practical details of that background matter. Although later summaries have sometimes simplified it into a “working-cla…
“If you set out to do a good deed, you may do a hundred small kindnesses on the way.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Alice Meynell, born Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson on 11 October 1847 and dead on 27 November 1922, was one of the most distinctive English writers to work across the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. A poet of exquisite compression, an essayist of alert and sensuous intelligence, a critic, editor, Catholic public intellectual, and campaigner for women’s suffrage, she made a literary identity that cannot be r…
“Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Tenderness