May Kendall
May Kendall, born Emma Goldworth Kendall, was an English author and poet known for her exploration of the interplay between spirituality and science, particularly in response to Victorian industrialization. The daughter of a Wesleyan minister, she initially gained recognition for her whimsical novel "That Very Mab," co-authored with Andrew Lang, which highlighted the clash between the fairy queen Mab and a scientist. Her poetry collection, "Dreams to Sell," features themes critiquing the scientific mindset that neglects the beauty of nature, exemplified by her poem "Education's Martyr." Kendall challenged traditional gender roles, embracing the freedoms available to women and asserting her voice as a minor poet free from mainstream influences. While her later novels did not achieve significant acclaim, she returned to poetry with "Songs from Dreamland," reiterating her earlier themes. After a period of diminished literary output, largely due to lack of critical favor, Kendall contributed to social welfare studies with philanthropist Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree. Her later life was marked by eccentricity, culminating in her passing in 1943, after which she was buried in an unmarked grave, supported by the Rowntree Trust.
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May Kendall
- Born: 1861
- Birthplace: Bridlington, Yorkshire, England
- Died: 1943
- Place of death:
Biography
May Kendall was the pseudonym of Emma Goldworth Kendall, the daughter of Eliza Goldworth Level Kendall and James Kendall, a Wesleyan minister in Bridlington, Yorkshire, England. Her first published work, written in collaboration with Andrew Lang, was That Very Mab, a whimsical novel about the clash between Mab, the queen of the fairies, and the scientist who wants to study her. The contrast between spirituality (Mab) and science was one that Kendall revisited in her other books. For example, her first collection of poetry, Dreams to Sell, contained the poem “Education’s Martyr,” depicting a scientist who fails to appreciate nature because he is too busy categorizing it. Implicit in both works is an attack on Victorian industrialization and the unexamined role of science and progress.
Kendall believed Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories challenged the Victorian view of the sexes, which saw women as aligned with nature while regarding men as the upholders of intellect and spirit. Kendall not only rejected women’s traditional roles and celebrated their newfound freedoms, but she also claimed that as a woman poet, and also as a minor poet, she was free of the poetic traditions that mainstream poets had to follow. Her book of verse had its admirers, but she had to contend with critics who believed that her poetry may have been aided by the work of Lang.
She turned to the novel in the late 1880’s, and her three novels, published between 1887 and 1893, did little to enhance her position in English letters. In 1894, she returned to poetry, and her Songs from Dreamland reiterated the themes of her earlier work. The poem “Fairies and the Philologist,” for example, demonstrates how the scientist has lost his sense of spirituality and wonder. Other poems return to the positions of the artist in high and low culture, maintaining that the street artist, like the minor writer, will not enjoy the immortality of the portrait painter or canonical writer but this marginalized position also has its advantages.
Perhaps because Songs from Dreamland did not meet with critical favor, Kendall wrote little after 1894. Although she occasionally published short stories and wrote Turkish Bonds, a collection of short stories critical of the Turkish treatment of the Armenians, she essentially retired from the literary stage. While she lived in York, she became acquainted with the Rowntrees, a family of philanthropists intent on improving social welfare. With Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, she wrote How the Labourer Lives: A Study of the Rural Labour Problem, extolling the virtues of healthy rural work while painting the stark poverty in which the rural poor live. She also gave Rowntree some uncredited help with his subsequent book, The Human Needs of Labour (1937).
As she aged, she became something of an eccentric, spending the last years of her life in a house overrun by cats. After her death in 1943, the Rowntree Trust paid for her funeral, and she is buried in an unmarked grave in York Cemetery.