Alice Meynell, Walter Pater, and Aestheticist Temporality

Alice Meynell claimed that she never read the works of Walter Pater, yet one of her best-known essays, "The Rhythm of Life" (1889), seems an oblique refutation of the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1874). I argue that Meynell's insistence on a "law of periodicity" represents a conception of temporality at odds with Pater's ideal of the ecstatic moment. Showing that many of her poems express a similar rejection of the epiphanic, I first suggest that this stance marks her difference not only from Pater, but also from the modernist writers who would later eclipse her, and ultimately gesture toward its political dimensions.