October 11, 1847

Alice Meynell (October 11, 1847 to November 27, 1922) was an English writer, and with her husband Wilfrid Meynell, a leader in the English Catholic community.  More biographical detail is here, the source of some excerpts below:

.....Alice Meynell was born to educated parents in 1847. She and her sister, a painter, spent their bohemian childhood partly in Italy. Meynell published Preludes (1875), her first book of poems, under her maiden name, Thompson. A convert to Roman Catholicism, Meynell and her husband, Wilfrid Meynell, edited the Weekly Register, a Catholic paper, and founded the magazine Merry England. Meynell regularly contributed essays to periodicals, wrote poetry, and raised a large family—seven children survived childhood. She worked for women’s suffrage, and her poems show her feminist concerns as well as her reactions to the events of World War I. ....

We have a revealing comment she made about Oscar Wilde's severe prison sentence (of two years.)

"[A]s punishment one wishes they [such sentences] might be made more tolerable...But while there is a weak omnibus horse or a hungry cat I am not going to spend feeling on Oscar."

Our citation for this quote is a recent book: Wilde's Women: How Oscar Wilde Was Shaped by the Women He Knew (2016). The author is Eleanor Fitzsimons.

Our quote is revealing of Alice Meynell, of Victorian intellectual society. But that does not  mean I know what is revealed.