Viola Meynell

Artist Info

Viola MeynellLondon, 1886 - 1956, Greatham, England

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n85049368

Meynell [married name Dallyn], Viola Mary Gertrude (1885–1956), novelist and short-story writer, was born on 15 October 1885 at 21 Upper Phillimore Place, London, the fifth of the seven children of Wilfrid Meynell (1852–1948), journalist and author, and his wife, Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell, née Thompson (1847–1922), poet and essayist. Her parents built a house at 47 Palace Court in Kensington in 1889, and she attended the convent school of the Sisters of Sion as a day student from about 1893 until 1901. She grew up in a strongly Roman Catholic literary atmosphere, helping her parents with their many journalistic tasks from an early age; many of her later novels and short stories reflect her Catholic upbringing, exploring themes of moral transgression and the possibility of redemption and the interaction of divine providence in the individual's life. She was especially close to her mother, adopting a great deal of her philosophy and values. Her first novels, Martha Vine (1910) and Cross-in-Hand Farm (1911), are relatively simple tales of love and morality, although already marked by the acute psychological analyses that are her fiction's great strength; her mother was supportive of her early fiction, but was concerned that it was too self-revelatory. With Lot Barrow (1913), she turned to an ironic rural tragedy, in the manner of Thomas Hardy, and began to find a wider and respectful audience; her reputation was solidified with the much lighter comic romance, Modern Lovers (1914).

In 1911 Meynell's father bought property in Greatham, Sussex, and she and the family thereafter divided their time between the country home and London. An early engagement to the Irish-born painter Charles Stabb was broken off by 1912. Many literary friends from London came to stay with the Meynells at Greatham: D. H. Lawrence lived there for six months in 1915, and a story he wrote during that time, ‘England, My England’, was perceived by the Meynells as a cruel attack on their family. Among Meynell's good friends in this period were Maitland Radford (whose marriage proposal she turned down in 1915), the novelists Ivy Low and Gladys Huntington, and the poet and children's author Eleanor Farjeon.

Although her brother Francis was a vocal pacifist, Meynell produced two books supporting the war effort: Julian Grenfell (1917) a short, impassioned biography of the soldier hero; and a translation of Eugène Lemercier's Lettres d'un soldat (1917). The novels she wrote during the war—Columbine (1915) and Narcissus (1916)—dealt directly with questions of sin and moral responsibility, and reflect the sombre mood of the times. She was engaged to her publisher, Martin Secker, but broke off with him just before their planned 1919 wedding. Her short volume of Verses (1919) was respectfully reviewed.

Meynell's next two novels, Second Marriage (1918) and Antonia (1921), were experiments in wedding psychological realism to mythic and allusive plot structures; Antonia was roundly damned by critics, who found it incoherent. Meynell surprised family and friends when she finally went through with a marriage proposal, marrying a local Sussex farmer and merchant who was neither literary nor Catholic, John William Dallyn (1879–1947), on 28 February 1922; she gave birth to a son, Jacob, in January 1923. Her mother's death in November 1922 was a turning point in her life. On the one hand, it liberated her artistically, as she turned to the short story (with the 1924 collection, Young Mrs Cruse and four later collections) and used it as a vehicle to portray her personal experiences more directly than she had done with her novels; on the other hand, her mother's memory continued to haunt her, and she spent some years researching and writing Alice Meynell: a Memoir (1929) and rededicating her time and efforts to the Meynell family. She and her husband separated finally in 1929 (as a Catholic, she never considered divorce, and continued to use her married name everywhere but on her published work), and she moved back to London while her son attended the Froebel school there. She lived at 14 St Mary Abbot's Terrace until 1930, when she moved back into the family home at Palace Court. By 1935 she had returned to Greatham, and lived there with only brief exceptions until her death. Much of her time at Greatham was occupied with caring for her aged and increasingly infirm father.

Meynell wrote fewer novels, producing instead reviews and articles for magazines and newspapers, and turning to editing projects such as an edition of the letters of J. M. Barrie (1942), which she took on at the request of her good friend Lady Cynthia Asquith, and two volumes of letters addressed to Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (1940 and 1956), to whom she was very close in the last few decades of her life. But during this period she also produced what may be her masterpiece, the ambitious novel Follow thy Fair Sun (1935), the fullest development of her psychological insights and her Catholic themes. She radically revised it—shortening it and eliminating its allegorical elements—and republished it under the title Lovers in 1944. She also produced more short stories, many of which, set on farms or in small villages, give insight into her life and experiences; her later stories are increasingly dark in tone and outlook.

Meynell's health deteriorated in the late 1940s, and she was eventually diagnosed as having muscular dystrophy. Despite a growing weakness and paralysis, she wrote one more novel (Ophelia, 1951), a memoir of her father's friendship with the poet Francis Thompson (1952), and more short stories. Four of her stories appeared in the New Yorker in 1955–6; one of these, ‘The Veranda’, is directly autobiographical in its depiction of her illness. She died at her home, Humphrey's Homestead, Greatham, on 27 October 1956, and was buried the same month in the Catholic cemetery in nearby Houghton. At her death, she was working on a volume of Collected Stories, published in 1957. Her body of work includes a dozen novels and some forty short stories in addition to her memoirs and miscellaneous poetry and prose. Her fame was at its height during the decade following the First World War, but her later work also found many readers and much critical acclaim for the beauty of its style and the depth of its probings into human motivation.

Raymond N. MacKenzie

Sources

Meynell's letters, priv. coll. [at family home, Greatham, Sussex] · private information (2004) [family] · V. Meynell, Alice Meynell: a memoir (1929) · V. Meynell, Francis Thompson and Wilfrid Meynell (1952) · b. cert. · d. cert.