A Girl Among the Anarchists

Description

By Isabel Meredith
University of Nebraska Press

Isabel Meredith is the narrator of A Girl Among the Anarchists and the pseudonym of Helen and Olivia Rossetti, daughters of William Michael Rossetti and nieces of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Their fin-de-siècle tenure as editors of the renowned British anarchist journal The Torch provided the experience that went into this entertaining and knowing novel. Young Isabel’s description of her upbringing echoes the eccentricities of the Rosetti household. Isolated, restless, she feels a strong desire to “free” herself from “all the ideas, customs, and prejudices” of her class and to throw herself “into the life and work of the masses.” She becomes immersed in a subversive community that was seldom seen by bourgeois women in late Victorian England. In picaresque fashion she recounts outlandish vignettes of the anarchist life-style. But in growing from a girl to a woman Isabel undergoes more than physical change.