![]() ![]() Her father was a naval surgeon, often absent, and the influence of her mother and her mother's relations, the Dowsons, a well-known Midlands Unitarian and suffragist family, was paramount - Alix's mother was herself a highly original, determined, emotional woman who had insisted on a career and trained as a professional nurse, volunteering to go out to Bombay in 1897, the year of the great plague.Īlix later recollected that she felt grown up at seven, shouldering responsibility in the largely fatherless family and nursing her mother, who had by then succumbed to recurring sick headaches and become a semi-invalid. The name was chosen by her mother, a fan of the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, in the romantic belief that this was what she called her son.Īlix Kilroy was brought up in provincial liberalism. To family and friends Alix, the second daughter, was always known as "Bay". The four confident and clever Kilroy sisters, referred to by Francis as the "Kilrush", were always to be close. ![]() She was born into a large, clannish professional family in Nottingham. In a sense she was an early "having-it-all" woman and her radiance lasted into a grand old age. ![]() She was a woman of rare intellectual clarity and physical energy: in her time she was an expert ballroom dancer and good skier. Her insistence that emotional truthfulness meant more than technical fidelity was prophetic of later, more tolerant sexual attitudes. Her long love affair and eventual marriage, in 1946, to Sir Francis Meynell, poet, distinguished typographer and founder of the Nonesuch Press, is described in her autobiography Private Servant, Public Woman with a candour that surprised and delighted women of a younger generation when it was published in 1988. ![]()
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