Meynell, Viola Mary Gertrude, 1885-1956

Viola Mary Gertrude Meynell, often called Prue or Prudie by her family, was born on October 15, 1885 in London, Enlgland, to Wilfrid and Alice (Thompson) Meynell. Viola grew up with six brothers and a sister, in the literary environment of the Meynell household whose family friends included authors George Meredith, Coventry Patmore, and Francis Thompson. Viola was given a Catholic education at the Convent of Our Lady of Sion in London. More than the rest of her siblings, Viola aspired to become an author like her mother.

Viola's first novel Martha Vine: A Love Story of Simple Life (1910) was published anonymously, but the novel received strong reviews and compliments from such writers as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Alfred Noyes. Over the next 46 years, Viola authored numerous novels and memoirs, including a memoir of her mother, Alice Meynell (1928), and one of the friendship between "The Hound of Heaven" poet and her father, Francis Thompson and Wilfrid Meynell (1952). She served as editor for several collections of letters of publishing figures including Sidney Cockerel and J.M. Barrie, and edited theLove Poems of John Donne (1923), published by her brother's publishing company Nonesuch Press. She also wrote introductions for Oxford University Press editions of George Eliot's Romola (1913), Felix Holt: The Radical (1913) and Melville's Moby Dick (1925).

Viola married John Dally in 1922, the same year her mother died. The couple had a son, Jacob, in 1923. Although in her later years Meynell struggled with a debilitating illness, she remained productive as a writer, publishing her last novel Ophelia in 1951. When she died in October 1956, she was remembered for her graciousness, sense of humor, and "the intense moral seriousness of her fiction."