Alice Meynell was extraordinarily well known during her career, which spanned the late-Victorian and mid-Georgian eras. Her elegant, acute essays were frequently praised, and as a poet she was given the attention due a cultural prodigy. A tiny body of work by Victorian standards, her poetry benefited from her austere, critical standards, which led her to champion the poets of the seventeenth century at a time when taste ran to the expansive, the didactic, and the sentimental. Meynell was important to the so-called Catholic revival in poetry chiefly as a figure in the lives of its central poets, Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore; yet her own poetry shows very little of their impress. Her religious poetry is, like the rest of her work, intellectually passionate, original, and compressed, qualities which set her apart from her contemporaries. Her knowledge of prosody and her controlled rhythms match the rigor and...