Viola Meynell, the daughter of British Catholic authors Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, was born in 1885. The sister of six brothers and sister, Viola grew up in the literary environment of the Meynell household. Among the visitors to the Meynell home were George Meredith, Coventry Patmore, and Francis Thompson. Her upbringing was decidedly Catholic, as her parents were converts to Catholicism, and she 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 who enjoyed a considerable amount of fame for her poetry, essays, criticism, and novels.

Alice MeynellViola'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 anyway. 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 various 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) and Felix Holt: The Radical (1913) and Melville's Moby Dick (1925).

Viola married in 1922, the same year her mother died. Her marriage to John Dallyn, a farmer neither literary nor Catholic, was apparently not happy. 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."

Source: Raymond N. MacKenzie,Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 153: Late-Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists, First Series The Gale Group, 1995. pp. 204-215.