Please join us to celebrate the launch of Selected Poems and Essays by Alice Meynell. The event will be hosted by Sarah Parker and feature readings and discussion with the book’s editor, Alex Wong, and the author’s great-granddaughter, Laura Mulvey, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.
Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.
Register here
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Fg5otx9ESIyUAbV_yJU6tg#/registration
Alice Meynell was a major British author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is the first anthology of her verse and prose to be published for over seventy-five years. Meynell was highly regarded both as a poet and as a writer of essays and was seriously proposed for the laureateship on two occasions. G.K. Chesterton said of her that she ‘never wrote a line, or even a word, that does not stand like the rib of a strong intellectual structure; a thing with the bones of thought in it’.
The present selection includes the early romantic poems of yearning, full of poignant surprises, and the terser, less personal poems of her maturity. Also included is a broad sample of Meynell’s literary essays, in each case a careful work of art. They include reflections on literature, culture and the natural world, nuanced observations on childhood, and moving defences (both specific and general) of women against trespasses on their dignity.
This selection is introduced by Alex Wong, who offers a poet’s view of Meynell’s distinctive artistic achievements and locates her within her literary contexts. It also includes an appreciative preface by the renowned feminist critic and theorist Laura Mulvey, who is the author’s great-granddaughter.
About the speakers:
Alex Wong was born in 1988 in London, where for the most part he was schooled, though he spent much of his childhood in O’ahu, Hawai’i. He studied and now teaches English literature at the University of Cambridge. Poems Without Irony, his first collection of poetry, was published by Carcanet in 2016, and his original and translated verse has appeared in PN Review, New Poetries VI, The Forward Book of Poetry 2018, and elsewhere. He also edits and introduces the Selected Verse of Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Selected Essays of Walter Pater for Carcanet Classics. He is the author of a critical book, The Poetry of Kissing in Early Modern Europe (2017), and his studies of English literature have appeared in various periodicals. Shadow and Refrain is his second collection of poems.
Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film, Emerita, at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989/2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996/2013), Citizen Kane (1992/2012), Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006) and Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (2019). She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1980). With artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis, she has made Disgraced Monuments (1994) and 23 August 2008 (2013).
Sarah Parker is Professor of Literature, Sexuality and Visual Culture at Loughborough University. She is the author ofForm and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895–1922 (Routledge, 2024) and The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity (Routledge, 2013). She is co-editor of Interrogating Lesbian Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Michael Field, For That Moment Only and Other Prose Works (MHRA, 2022) and Michael Field: Decadent Moderns (Ohio University Press, 2019).
You may also like the following events from Carcanet Press:
- Next Wednesday, 10th September, 06:00 pm, The Idea of an Entire Life by Billy-Ray Belcourt: Carcanet Online Book Launch in Manchester, United Kingdom
- This month, 24th September, 06:00 pm, Red Carpet by Steve Malmude: Carcanet Online Book Launch in Manchester, United Kingdom
- Next month, 2nd October, 06:00 pm, PN Review Autumn Readings 2025 in Manchester
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