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Prejudice Unveiled: and Other Poems
In this volume of poetry, activist poet Lizelia Moorer, a teacher at South Carolina’s first black college, presents a sweeping portrayal of the nature of racial oppression. She noted that white writers misrepresented the experience of African Americans in the South and set out to tell “the unvarnished truth.” She confronts lynching, debt peonage, rape, segregation, and the hypocrisy of the church. The frontispiece may be the first depiction of an African American woman with a typewriter. -
Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter
Amelia Opie managed to earn an income from her writing following the death of her husband, the artist John Opie, when she was 38. Her novel Adeline Mowbry is based on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, despite the fact that Opie did not countenance Wollstonecraft's rejection of marriage. The two met briefly in the last years of Wollstonecraft's life. Opie, a Quaker convert, was involved with charitable works and worked with fellow Quaker Elizabeth Fry on prison reform. She advocated the abolition of slavery and was a delegate to the 1840 Anti-Slavery Convention. Her poem The Negro Boy’s Tale, also in the collection, is an uncompromising condemnation of slavery. -
[Virginia Woolf’s writing desk]
Writer, printer, and feminist Virginia Woolf was at the center of the Bloomsbury Group during the first half of the twentieth century and was one of the leading figures of modernist literature. Woolf commissioned this oak writing desk while she was in her teens and used it until she was around thirty years old. She specifically requested a standing desk. In 1929, Woolf gave the desk to her nephew, Quentin Bell, an artist and member of the Bloomsbury Group. His wife Anne Olivier Bell, the editor of Virginia Wool’s diaries, cut six inches off the legs to make it a sitting desk. Quentin Bell painted Cleo, the muse of history, on the sloped top in the style of the Omega Workshops. -
Letter to Ellen Nussey
Charlotte Brontë begins this letter to her lifelong friend with an update on her efforts to secure work as a governess. She goes on to relate a visit from the wife of a curate whose husband ruined their family through his drinking and “treated her and her child savagely.” Brontë attests to her own distaste for the curate even before she knew about his abusive character. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell quotes this section of the letter in her biography of Brontë, noting that it “shows her instinctive aversion to a particular class of men, whose vices some have supposed she looked upon with indulgence.” -
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's mother Mary Wollstonecraft died following her birth. She was largely educated by her father William Godwin. She was not quite seventeen when she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley. Frankenstein is considered to be the first work of science fiction. In this third edition, she recounts for the first time the story of its origin during a ghost story writing contest in a villa on Lake Geneva. The novel explores what it means to be human and the ethical implications of scientific research. This edition is the first with a preface by Mary Shelley and the first with illustrations. -
Progress of Female Virtue: Engraved by A. Cardon from the Original Drawings by Mrs. Cosway
Maria Hadfield grew up in Florence, where she studied art, copying paintings at the Uffizi under Johan Zoffany. She was elected to the Florentine Accademia delle Arti del Disegno at eighteen. Influenced by Henry Fuseli and Angelica Kauffman, Cosway continued to paint after her marriage, but her husband, the miniaturist Richard Cosway, would not permit her to sell her work. A pioneer in liberal education, she established a number of girls schools in Italy. The aquatints in Progress of Female Virtue are from her drawings. -
Poems, on Several Occasions
Working-class poets in the eighteenth century pushed back against the simplistic tradition of the English pastoral and its romantic portrayal of the life of rural laborers. Mary Collier and Ann Yearsley are notable examples. Yearsley was a milkmaid and farmer’s wife. Writer and philanthropist Hannah More learned of her poetry in 1783 and became her patron, arranging for Yearsley to publish a book by subscription. Poems led to immediate success and a break with More over the distribution of profits. Yearsley continued to publish, maintaining full editorial control over her work. -
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book and the first American woman to seek to earn a living from her writings. Born in West Africa, she was purchased by Susanna and John Wheatley at age seven or eight. Susanna taught her to read and write. Her Poems, rejected in racist Boston, were first published in London, financed by Selena Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. They reflect Wheatley’s breadth of learning, identity as an African, and life as an enslaved woman. This first edition belonged to Melatiah Bent, a widowed tavern keeper. Wheatley signed the verso of the title page. -
The woman's labour: an epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck, in answer to his late poem The thresher's labour: to which are added, the three wise sentences taken from the first book of Esdras, ch. III and IV
Mary Collier was likely the first of the English poets to identify herself as of the “laboring classes.” Over her lifetime, Collier worked as a field worker, domestic, and brewer. Taught to read as a child by her mother, she hoped to supplement her income by self-publishing and selling her book of poems. Collier included a signed attestation corroborating that the poems were indeed written by her, a strategy later employed in Phillis Wheatley’s Poems (1773). In The Thresher’s Lament, Stephen Duck denigrated women’s labor. Collier responded in witty though scathing verse in The Woman’s Labour. This is the only known copy of the second edition of this work.
When Ev'ning does approach, we homeward hie,
And our domestic Toils incessant ply:
Against your coming Home prepare to get
Our Work all done, our House in order set
Bacon and Dumpling in the Pot we boil,
Our beds we make, our Swine we feed the while
Then wait at Door to see you coming Home,
And set the Table out against you come:
Early next Morning we on you attend
Our Children dress and feed, their Cloaths we mend
And in the Field our daily Task renew,
Soon as the rising Sun has dry'd the Dew. -
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America
The Puritan emigre Anne Bradstreet was America’s earliest English-language poet. Well-educated as a child, she married at sixteen and migrated to the colonies with her husband in 1630. Bradstreet owned a significant library of approximately eight hundred books that were lost to fire when her Andover house burned in 1666. Fortunately, the manuscript notebooks of her poetry survived the fire. This copy of the Tenth Muse is from the first edition of her first book, the only compilation of her poetry to appear during her lifetime.
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits.
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong;
For such despite they cast on female wits,
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance—
They’ll say it was stolen, or else it was by chance. -
Lo Stipo
Prolific author and performer Margherita Costa traveled from city to city to perform in the theaters and private salons of Europe’s great courts. She did not shy away from crossing the boundaries around decorous female writing, and some of her works have a feminist twist. These two works bound together include poems on unwanted pregnancy, female cosmetics, and sexual double standards. -
Lettere d'Isabella Andreini Padouana
Isabella Andreini was the most celebrated commedia dell’arte actor of her time, and with her husband managed and was a member of the celebrated Gelosi theatrical troupe. Andreini was admitted into the Accademia degli Intenti in Pavia, and though she was involved in theater, she still managed to cultivate an image of a virtuous woman. -
Parthenicôn Elisabethae Ioannae Westoniae, virginis nobilissimae, poëtriae florentissimae, linguarum plurimarum peritissimae
Elizabeth Jane Weston wrote more Latin occasional poems than any other English woman. Her family moved to Prague when she was still a child, and when her family fell on hard times, she wrote a series of poems pleading for the restitution of their goods and seeking patronage. Her second book of verse, Parthenicôn, presents an expanded and revised version of those poems. Note the woodcut figure on the title page with its oversized quill pen. -
Amorosa speranza: fauola pastorale
Valeria Miani and Isabella Andreini wrote of love, both erotic and sensual, atypical themes for women writing at this time. Both were in the sphere of the Venetian Court, part of a significant circle of women writers in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Dramatist and poet Miani was the first Italian woman to publish a tragedy. Amorosa speranza’s engraved ornamental title page depicts putti plucking leaves and making crowns of laurel, a tribute to Miani perhaps? This pastoral drama was written to be performed. It is a tale of mistaken identities, a husband lost, a new admirer, and satyrs and sprites. -
Tutte le rime della illustriss. et eccellentiss. signora Vittoria Colonna, marchesana di Pescara: con l'esposition del signor Rinaldo Corso, nuouamente mandate in luce da Girolamo Ruscelli
A member of a powerful Roman family, poet Vittoria Colonna was widowed, wealthy, famous, and childless. Though thirteen editions of her Rime were published before her death, much of her verse circulated in scribal copies. Her published prose reflects her interest in religious reform, an interest that led to her being investigated during the Inquisition. An impeccable stylist with elegant taste, she commissioned a manuscript of her sonnets, now in the Vatican Library, as a gift for her close friend Michelangelo. This edition of her poetry also contains two poems by Veronica Gambara. -
Rime della signora Laura Terracina
Neapolitan lyric poet Laura Terracina called for women to put down their needles, take up their pens, and seek the fame that would prove men wrong to doubt their abilities. She published prolifically and successfully—eight volumes during her lifetime and a ninth left in manuscript at her death. Rime, her first book, opens with a strong, elegantly cut, contemporary portrait of Terracina. She was inducted into the Accademia degli Incogniti in 1545, a rare honor for a woman. Terracina’s second book, a verse commentary on Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso established her as a leading writer. This commentary is also in the collection. -
Marguerites de la Marguerite des princesses, tresillustre royne de Nauarre
Erudite, powerful, and scholarly, Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, was the sister of King François I. A patron of humanists and reformers, she wrote biblical comedies as well as secular works. In the 1520s, Marguerite became involved in an evangelical reform movement within the Catholic Church; she believed that scripture should be available to the common people. The “pearls” (marguerites) in this work include poems designed to be set to familiar popular music, allowing her to spread her message more widely. The lovely woodcuts and ornaments by Petit Bernard appear to follow the captions devised by Marguerite. This book was censured as heretical by the theologians of the Sorbonne.
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