May Kendall [Emma Goldworth] (1861–1943)

May Kendall was born Emma Goldworth Kendall, in Bridlington, Yorkshire, the daughter of James Kendall, a Wesleyan minister, and his wife Eliza (Goldworth Level). Little is known about her early life, but she was clearly well educated and certainly highly intelligent. Poetry constituted only part of her creative output: as well as two volumes of verse, Kendall also published several novels. She was a strong believer in woman’s right to an independent life as well as her intellectual equality with men. She never married, but she enjoyed working alongside men and collaborated extensively with two men in particular: Andrew Lang and B. Seebohm Rowntree. Andrew Lang (1844– 1912) was a Scottish poet, anthropologist, historian and Greek scholar, whose work had a wide impact and to whose light, clever, topical poetry many women were drawn (Levy and Watson as well as Kendall and Naden, for example). Certainly, something of his deftly jaunty style rubs off on her own verse, along with another comic influence, that of master wordsmith Lewis Carroll. With Lang, Kendall published a book of verses and satirical essays on contemporary society, science and politics, titled That Very Mab (1885). Much later in her life, after moving to York, she became involved with the well-known family of Quaker philanthropists, the Rowntrees. She helped Seebohm Rowntree with his study How the Labourer Lives (1913), and with his work on the minimum wage, The Human Needs of Labour (1918). While Rowntree provided the statistics, Kendall wove a readable narrative spiced with anecdotes. She refused to take any payment for this work, although she was eventually to die in poverty herself and lie in an unmarked grave in York Cemetery.