author
Isabel Meredith
Best known for A Girl Among the Anarchists, this name was the shared pen name of sisters Olivia Rossetti Agresti and Helen Rossetti Angeli. Their lively, semi-fictional account draws on their unusual youth in London’s radical circles and still feels vivid more than a century later.
1 Audiobook
A Girl Among the Anarchists
by Isabel Meredith
About the author
Isabel Meredith was not one person but the pseudonym used by sisters Olivia Rossetti Agresti and Helen Rossetti Angeli. Born into the remarkable Rossetti family, they were the daughters of writer and critic William Michael Rossetti and nieces of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which placed them close to literary and artistic life from the start.
As teenagers, the sisters became involved in anarchist circles and helped found and edit The Torch, an anarchist journal published in the 1890s. That experience later fed into A Girl Among the Anarchists (1903), the book most closely associated with Isabel Meredith. The novel is often described as a fictionalized memoir, blending sharp observation, humor, and firsthand familiarity with radical politics.
What makes the work memorable is its unusual point of view: it captures political idealism, danger, and eccentricity through the eyes of a young woman moving through a world rarely described from that angle. Even today, the Isabel Meredith name stands out for offering a fresh, human look at fin-de-siècle anarchist culture.