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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2006
In 1875, the young poet Alice Thompson (soon to be Alice Meynell) published Preludes (1875), a slender volume of lyrics illustrated by her sister, Elizabeth. Given the professional musical training of the Thompson women, the title of the volume may recall Chopin's musical Preludes (1838), those brief lyrical pieces composed when Chopin was twenty-seven that cover all twenty-four musical keys and demonstrate, as one critic has put it, an “astonishing variety and vividness of mood…achieve[d] in little more than a blink of an eye” (Siepman 5). Meynell's Preludes, written in her mid-twenties and published when she, too, was twenty-seven, may similarly have aimed at variety and vividness of mood, achieved within the brief compass of lyric verse; this sense of the title certainly fits with a wide range of subjects, meters, and stanzaic forms in the volume. Yet whether or not the title embeds a musical allusion, Preludes suggests, more fundamentally, a first volume of poetry, a volume anticipatory of a later, larger poetic achievement and perhaps also of a new direction in lyric verse.