I’ve neglected posting as I design poetry workshops and research Maine women. Both work is exciting and one balances the other.
As I work on the America’s Notable Women series, I am intrigued by Daughters of Genius by James Parton, published by Hubbard brothers in 1888. The subtitle is A Series of Sketches of Authors, Artists, Reformers, and Heroines, Queens, Princesses, and Women of Society, Women Eccentric and Peculiar!
Among the 43 profiled women are Queen Victoria, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Joan of Arc, Peggy Shippen (Benedict Arnold’s wife), Empress Josephine (Napoleon’s wife), and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
My favorite profile is that of Louisa May Alcott. It’s filled with her own quotes about writing. On seeing her first stories printed in the Saturday Evening Gazette, she writes, “Only those who have known this experience can understand the intense satisfaction one feels on seeing his first literary efforts actually in print, and the sheet in which they appear always finds a warm place in the heart of the grateful scribbler.”
Daughters of Genius is an ancestor of the America’s Notable Women series! You can read this book online here.
