previous next
[289] art of intellectual bread-making — the production of permanent literature.

It must be readily admitted that the contributions of American women to the poetry and fiction of the day are abundant and creditable. But it must be remembered that journalism itself is hardly more ephemeral than all poetry or fiction short of the highest; and our rapid American life has already created and forgotten several generations of such short-lived celebrities. In Griswold's laborious “Female poets of America,” published some forty years ago, there is hardly a name that is now remembered; and Poe and Willis in those days used to place a crown of the most perishable materials on the head of every woman who flattered them or whom they wished to flatter. Apart from their tributes, a place on Parnassus was supposed to be securely held by the Davidson sisters, for instance, two half-developed girls, who earned by their pathetic early deaths what really passed for fame. It is doubtful whether a place more permanent can be assigned to the good-natured Cary sisters. A greater loss to memory is the fame of Miss Sedgwick, whose graphic and sensible fiction-realistic in the best sense-seems absolutely unknown to the generation now growing up. Is it so certain that the women now popular as poets and novelists are securer in their position than their predecessors?

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Griswoldsville (Georgia, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
N. P. Willis (1)
C. M. Sedgwick (1)
E. A. Poe (1)
Cary (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: