ABSTRACT
The daughter of independently wealthy, culturally enlightened parents, Meynell was educated by daily tutorials and a life lived, in alternate seasons, in northern Italy and England. Brought up among adults and books, she wrote poems as early as seven years old and resolved to be a poet. Her famous protest, written in her diary at age eighteen, signals her seriousness of purpose: "Of all the crying evils in the depraved earth . . . the greatest, judged by all the laws of God and humanity, is the miserable selfishness of men that keeps women from work." But her diaries also reveal her struggle to balance her dedication to work with an equal interest in an active life among people.
